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The Thin Veil is a show for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of Palestine—and what Palestine can reveal about the systems shaping our world. Hosted by musician/activist and anti-Zionist Jew Ezra Lipp, who was raised in a Zionist ecosystem and is now, as always, on a continuing journey of learning and unlearning.
Through long-form conversations with historians, journalists, artists, activists, and people with lived experience, the show explores Palestine not in isolation, but as a window into questions of power, history, identity, media, ideology, resistance, and the stories we inherit about the world around us.
Ezra Lipp: [00:00:00] Coming up on The Thin Veil
Zachary Foster: the point of disengagement was to kill the two-state solution. Zionists, and their apologists will tell you this was an opportunity for a two-state solution. The people who designed disengagement said the point of it, and they said this publicly at the time, was to kill the two-state solution.
Israel doesn't wanna engage in negotiations.
Disengagement was not part of any negotiation process, had nothing to do with the peace process. It was Israel unilaterally making decisions that it believed would kill [00:00:30] and crush the future prospects of a Palestinian state.
So the myth, the narrative "We gave back Gaza to the Palestinians," that was the point of disengagement, was to create a talking point so that Israel could market its occupation more easily.
So it withdraws, from inside the territory, but it doesn't, end the occupation. It just redeploys its troops.
So the point of disengagement was not just to, kill the two-state solution and create a new talking point for Israeli propagandists. but it was also to shut down, to [00:01:00] enclose, seal off the Gaza Strip, to blockade it, which is exactly what Israel did when it left Gaza in 2005
Well, hello and welcome back to The Thin Veil with Ezra Lipp.
This is episode 27 of The Thin Veil.
The Thin Veil is a show attempting to lift the veil of misunderstanding when it comes to [00:01:30] Palestine and Zionism, We would love it if you left a rating or a review of the show wherever you're listening to it.
Like, subscribe, hit the notification bell on YouTube so you never miss a video or an episode. you can also support the show on Patreon, become a monthly supporter of the work we do here, or leave a one-time tip or donation on Ko-fi. I have links to both those in the show notes, and I would so appreciate it. We have a challenge for this week, which [00:02:00] is I invite you to send this episode to, somebody you know who might think differently than you on these topics, somebody who might still consider themselves a Zionist.
this is a, a, a very, informative episode, and I think a lot of people could learn from this episode.
We have an incredible guest today, Dr. Zachary Foster. Zachary Foster is a historian of Palestine and has a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from [00:02:30] Princeton University
He is also the editor-in-chief of Palestine Nexus. Palestine Nexus is an invaluable resource to understand the history and modern-day events of what is happening in Palestine. They have courses, which I'm currently enrolled in,
They have essays, articles, academia, maps, historical documents. It is an archival resource. There's writings from Palestinians in Gaza, many others. [00:03:00] I recommend you go check out Palestine Nexus, linked in the show notes. Support their Patreon page.
there's so much I could have talked to Zachary about on this show. He really is an encyclopedia of knowledge on this stuff and is very impressive. I decided to narrow the focus of the show on one particular period,between the disengagement of the Israeli settlements from Gaza in 2005 leading up [00:03:30] to, October 7, 2023.
This is a often very misunderstood and weaponized period of Palestinian history where Zionists will,often point to, Israel's disengagement from Gaza and say they left Gaza to the Palestinians and look what happened. I go into this in a little more detail, in the episode, as you will hear.
There's so much misunderstanding and distortions of this [00:04:00] history, so I really wanted to treat this episode as more of a really important historical resource. And Zachary goes into so much depth and detail and contextualization of what happens during this 18-year period, and I just kinda wanted to have it as a, as a reference and a resource and something you could share with others, something that you could learn about yourself.
I've been studying this history, and there's still so much to know. I learned a ton, having this conversation. [00:04:30] So without further ado, I hope you get a lot of value from this conversation with myself and Dr. Zachary Foster
Ezra Lipp: I'm very honored you're taking the time to do this. There's a lot I wanna talk to you about, specifically involving, Gaza between the period of 2005 and 2023.
However, before we delve into some of that history, for listeners that aren't familiar with you and your background, I would love if you [00:05:00] could talk about who you are, what you do, and, we'll delve into a little about your journey of how you got to what you're doing today.
Zachary Foster: Yeah, so I grew up in Jewish Detroit going to Jewish schools and Jewish summer camps and Jewish youth groups, and I spent some time in Jerusalem, spent some time in Palestine, ended up doing a PhD in Palestinian history focusing on the origins of a Palestinian identity. And today I publish a newsletter called, the [00:05:30] Palestine Nexus Newsletter.
We try to provide historical context for the present moment. We also publish work coming out of writers in Palestine, primarily from writers in Gaza, reporting from the ground on what's happening on the genocide. And we also offer courses at Palestine Nexus, courses on Jewish anti-Zionism, courses on the history of Palestine and the Palestinians, and a general overview of sort of the Israel-Palestine question
Ezra Lipp: Excellent. And I so appreciate your work. it's an incredibly valuable resource. I know you haven't always [00:06:00] been historian on Palestine. You grew up in a Jewish Zionist family, like myself,
under the veil of Zionism. I don't wanna spend too much time on this, but would love it if you could just briefly walk us through your evolution starting in a Zionist ecosystem and then becoming a, full-on anti-Zionist academic, creating archive material for Palestinian history.
Zachary Foster: You could say I was a classic example of blowback because [00:06:30] I was not just exposed to the standard Jewish Zionist narrative that most American Jewish Zionists are raised with, but I went to the University of Michigan, and I got involved in the Israel, movement on campus. At the time, the pro-Israel group was called American Movement for Israel, AMI.
And I went to Israel multiple times on these fellowships, these Hasbara fellowships, to get trained to become a, a pro-Israel activist, to be trained to become a, third-tier AIPAC lobbyist. that was [00:07:00] my destiny, and I think my problem was that I just got too curious. Like, I actually wanted to know the history.
I wanted to get at the truth. There was all this, all these debates, right? When you're exposed to this propaganda, basically ex- exposed to the other narrative, and then you're taught how to respond to it. In my case, I was exposed to the other narrative and got curious.
I was like, "Well, is this stuff true?" And I think the way I would summarize my trajectory is the deeper you dig, the more you [00:07:30] study the history of Zionism, the more anti-Zionist you become. Because what you discover is that every Zionist leader, starting from Theodor Herzl in the 1890s, going on down to Arthur Ruppin and Israel Zangwill in the 1920s, and Chaim Weizmann in 1930, and Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and Golda Meir, and Moshe Sharett, and Yosef Weitz, Yosef Smilansky, every single Zionist leader with zero exceptions Supported what they called the transfer of [00:08:00] Palestinians out of Palestine.
That was how you solve the Arab problem, i.e. the problem that there are too many Arabs in Palestine. And so here you had a historical movement which was all about creating a Jewish state in a country that was overwhelmingly non-Jewish, and the solution that they all agreed on and how to carry out that plan, how to implement the Zionist dream, was transfer, was expulsion, which is exactly what they ended up doing in 1948.
And when you realize that this movement that you're supposed to be proud of was actually a movement all about the [00:08:30] dispossession of an entire people, their exile, their permanent exile, 'cause right, it's not just enough that you displace them once. They have to remain permanently displaced forever and ever, including their children and grandchildren, because that's how you maintain a Jewish majority in a non-Jewish country.
And so when you realize that this movement is founded on the principle of dispossession of another people, and, the destruction and an annihilation of another society. We're talking about not just, people being displaced from their homes, but 400 to 500 Palestinian [00:09:00] villages just being wiped off the map, right?
We're talking about, all the cultural institutions of the society, religious sites, mosques, holy sites, pilgrimage sites erased, and that was just the beginning, right? That's 1948. that's the beginning of the process, and it's been 78 years since of ongoing displacements, ongoing dispossession, ongoing ghettoization, ongoing Bantustanization, because you still had a lot of Palestinians left in Israel, right?[00:09:30]
And then when Israel conquered Gaza and the West Bank, you had even more. So do you preserve that Jewish domination, that Jewish self-determination, that Jewish supremacy in a country with so many non-Jews? so I think when you realize that that is what Zionism is about, it's about Jewish domination and Jewish supremacy and Jewish control and Jewish prosperity in a country of mostly non-Jews.
When you realize that is what the core of the Zionist movement is all about, I think you end up realizing it's a deeply unethical movement, and we should all oppose it[00:10:00]
Ezra Lipp (2): I couldn't agree more. I do have more questions about your personal background. I know you've spoken about this at other places, and I'm gonna resist asking because I don't wanna waste your expertise today, what I'd really love to focus this conversation on is this pervasive Israeli Hasbara propaganda, pro-Israel talking point, this myth about the disengagements of Israeli settlements from Gaza in 2005, [00:10:30] and, this myth of uh, Palestinian sovereignty and Hamas control over that area.
and so the pervasive myth, which I'm sure you've heard a million times stated in various ways, is, "Hey, Israel, left Gaza in 2005. They disbanded all their settlements. It was a rehearsal for the two-state solution to see if they could govern themselves, be peaceful neighbors.
they could have developed the Singapore of the Middle East. instead they, [00:11:00] destroyed Israeli greenhouses. They immediately, elected this crazy terrorist Islamist organization, Hamas. Hamas started lobbing rockets over the Israeli border, killing Israeli civilians, creating these terror tunnels."
and then what happens 20 years later? they do October 7th, this biggest massacre
since the Holocaust. Zero context, zero contextualizing, zero understanding of Hamas, as a resistance movement, as a political body, as it became after [00:11:30] 2006. zero contextualization of the blockade, the tunnel economy, the, civil war and the attempted coup between Fatah and the US against Hamas after the elections.
and then of course, zero, context of, Israel's, mowing the lawn campaigns, the various wars, Israel launched against Hamas. So I would really love to delve into all that. So I know that was a lot. So let's start from, this idea of [00:12:00] disengagement from Gaza
what was the greater context for Sharon's decision to, disband these, 7,000 Israeli settlers that were living in, Gaza at the time? how is it different than the Israeli, pro-Israel contextualization What was the real motivation
let's start there.
Zachary Foster: There were two primary reasons for the disengagement. the first one, which was uttered at the time, None of this is private. These statements were all made publicly. Was the advisor, the political advisor to [00:12:30] then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. His name was Dov Weisglass.
And he explained that the point of disengagement was to kill the two-state solution. So the Zionists, and their apologists will tell you this was an opportunity for a two-state solution. The people who designed disengagement said the point of it, and they said this publicly at the time, was to kill the two-state solution.
It was political formaldehyde. The point was that, Israel doesn't wanna engage in negotiations. That's what a two-state [00:13:00] solution framework is all about, right? It's all about negotiations, bilateral or potentially multilateral negotiations. Discussions. We give you this, you give us that. There's concessions happening.
Disengagement was not part of any negotiation process, had nothing to do with the peace process. It was completely outside of the framework of the two-state solution. It was Israel unilaterally making decisions that it believed would kill and crush the future prospects of a Palestinian state.
Now, why is that? [00:13:30] Because at the time, so this is 2005, right? we're kind of in the aftermath of the Second Intifada, at which point there were talks between Israelis and Palestinians. but, there was a lot of violence, and the occupation was intensifying, and these talks were not really going anywhere.
And the goal for Israeli, leaders, was to kill that process. They don't wanna have to make concessions to Palestinians. As soon as you're in negotiations, means you're gonna have to give something up. Israel doesn't wanna give anything up. It wants to make decisions [00:14:00] unilaterally on what will and will not happen to the future of the occupied Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank.
So That was the first reason. The second reason was, to have a point of propaganda, they explicitly said this at the time, is that, "We need to develop new talking points for the occupation," 'cause the occupation's ugly, it's costly, it's violent, it's brutal, and it's making Israel look bad.
And this is right around the time as well, in the early 2000s, where y- more and more Jews are starting to turn against Israel because Israel's brutalizing Palestinians. From 2000 to 2005, Israel kills about [00:14:30] 3,300 Palestinians. It's the most violent period in Israeli-Palestinian conflict history to date.
Israel's looking worse and worse in the eyes of global public opinion. It needs to, refashion its image in the eyes of the world. And so it believes that this disengagement, "We gave back land," right? So the myth, the narrative that you're telling me about, "We gave back Gaza to the Palestinians," that was the point of disengagement, was to create a talking point so that Israel could market its occupation [00:15:00] more easily.
So it was, "We're gonna kill the two-state solution by making decisions ourselves about what happens to the occupied territories rather than discussing them with the Palestinians," and number two, to create a talking point to market the occupation, better to Western audiences. and that's exactly what Israel did, right?
So it withdraws, from inside the territory, but it doesn't, end the occupation. It just redeploys its troops. of course, it doesn't end its occupation because it still controls six of the seven land borders. It still controls the [00:15:30] airspace. It still controls the groundwater. It still controls the telecommunication networks, and it still controls the population registry.
So it's an effective that still controls Gaza on all sides, from above and below, from the land, from the air, and from the sea. It has complete control over Gaza, which is why every single international legal scholar from 2005 to today maintains that Israel never ended its occupation of [00:16:00] Gaza.
zero international legal experts would say Israel ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005. Zero. Like, there's nobody. The only ones you'll find, perhaps, are, lawyers that work for the Israeli government, whose job it is to provide legal excuses and legal rationale for violations of international law.
But of course, Israel never gave up any control of Gaza, and the proof is in the pudding, that beginning in 2006, '7, '8, Israel massively increased and expanded and tightened [00:16:30] its control of Gaza, reducing the number of people allowed to enter and exit the Strip after 2005, after the disengagement plan. Right?
So the point of disengagement was not just to, kill the two-state solution and create a new talking point for Israeli propagandists. but it was also to shut down, to enclose, seal off the Gaza Strip, to blockade it, which is exactly what Israel did when it left Gaza in 2005
Ezra Lipp: how relevant was Israel's strategy [00:17:00] of what they wanted to do in the West Bank at that time, as far as, deciding to leave Gaza, disband the settlements? was part of that, consolidating resources, either economically or militarily to, further tighten control of the West Bank?
Zachary Foster: That's exactly right. So the Gaza disengagement was accompanied by the withdrawal from four Israeli settlements in the northern West Bank, right? The northern West Bank is the area of the West Bank with the fewest number of [00:17:30] Israeli settlements. if you look at the area roughly between Nablus and Jenin, there aren't very many Israeli settlements.
This has been sort of the historic heartland of Palestine, of Palestinian population centers, right? Most of the Palestinian population centers, this is going back decades, centuries, long before the establishment of the state of Israel. Most of the Palestinian population centers are in the mountainous interior.
They're in the area of what is today primarily the West Bank. and so Israel wanted to consolidate its control, right? Rather than have scattered settlements in areas where it was [00:18:00] unlikely that Israel would have future permanent military domination, that we would wanna consolidate our settlements in areas where there are larger numbers of Israeli settlers already present.
and I mean, this has long been part of the Zionist, strategy for taking over Palestine, is you create nuclei of settlements, and you expand outward slowly. You don't create settlements totally isolated amidst and among Palestinian population centers. It's just stupid from a strategic point of view.
You [00:18:30] wanna create nuclei of settlements. And that's exactly what they were doing, both with Gaza disengagement and with the settlements that were evacuated in the northern West Bank. That's exactly correct. Of course, it has nothing to do with ending the occupation. There were more settlers, I believe, that got relocated
they were expanding settlements in the West Bank literally at the same time that they were taking away these settlements in Gaza. So this had nothing to do with ending the occupation. It was just a strategic recalibration of the occupation.
Ezra Lipp: Exactly. Okay. So, shortly after [00:19:00] that in 2006, elections took place in Gaza. Hamas ran. It was the first time they decided, if I'm not mistaken, to participate in the, political process as established by the Palestinian Authority that was created, during the Oslo years. what was the background?
Why did these elections come about? Why did Hamas run? What did they run on? And why do you think, their message resonated that they got a plurality of [00:19:30] the votes
Zachary Foster: Yeah, so Hamas did not run in any of the elections that were established as a part of the Oslo process before 2006, There had been elections in the '90s, in the early 2000s. Hamas took no part in them. They considered the Oslo process illegitimate. they didn't wanna be engaged in negotiations with Israel.
They didn't recognize Israel. they thought those negotiations, which were based on these recognitions of the state of Israel, were therefore themselves illegitimate. And so they stayed out. Now, what happened was, in the early 2000s, George W. Bush, then US [00:20:00] president, was obsessed with bringing democracy to the Middle East, right?
if you recall the rhetoric in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, that was also, illegal. the rhetoric was we're bringing democracy to the Middle East. and this was the same thinking in Palestine. The Palestinians need to hold elections. Like then US President George W.
Bush and then US Secretary Condoleezza Rice obsessed over elections. They were pushing Mahmoud Abbas at the time to hold elections. and they were also pushing Hamas to, take part in the elections. Why? Because they [00:20:30] thought Hamas would lose.
They were begging Hamas to join, and eventually Hamas basically caved in and said, "Okay, fine. we'll take part in these elections." And if I'm not mistaken, the results, were something like 44% of the vote went to Hamas, and about 41% of the vote went to Fatah. So neither party won a absolute majority, but Hamas did win a plurality of the vote. And the reason they won was actually quite simple. H- Fatah was incredibly corrupt. Fatah is kind of synonymous with the [00:21:00] Palestinian Authority itself because it was dominated, it always has been dominated by the Palestinian Authority.
The PA was incredibly corrupt. Everyone knew it. And so on the one hand, you had these octogenarians who had been flown in from Tunisia, who were incompetent, and they were corrupt,
they had spent the previous 50 years as resistance fighters in exile, as a liberationist movement. These people didn't know how to govern. and they had no idea what they were doing. So it was poor governance. It was corruption. and also, by the way, by 2005, [00:21:30] what had the peace process brought to the Palestinians?
What had it brought them? The occupation intensified. After five years of Intifada, the Israeli army had just shattered the Palestinian economy. They had abducted and imprisoned thousands of Palestinians. There was no peace. There was no Palestinian state. There was no end to the occupation.
On the contrary, the occupation intensified. The settlements increased. The settler violence expanded. So the Oslo process was a catastrophe. Everyone [00:22:00] knew it. Everyone could see it. So on the one hand, you had Fatah and the PA, who represented corruption, who represented poor governance, and, and who represented a failure to bring about any political resolution to the conflict.
And then on the other hand, you had Hamas, These were people who they would go in the streets, and they would campaign on a ballot of, "I will live in a, a tin shack my whole life." These are pious people who had spent the previous 20 years raising money for orphanages and after-school programming for kids, and they [00:22:30] had raised money for women's empowerment.
I mean, these were basically social justice guys who also, murdered Israeli soldiers and killed Israeli civilians. But they were basically seen as the less corrupt of the two parties, and they won
Ezra Lipp: And I'll also mention that Fatah was largely seen as, collaborators with the Israeli occupation, like doing the dirty work of Israel's, yeah
Zachary Foster: Yes. that's exactly correct. In fact, there's this common misconception that [00:23:00] as part of the Oslo process, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were divided into these three zones, right? Zone A, B, and C. It's kind of all a fiction, right? Because Zone A is supposedly Palestinian security and civilian control.
But in fact, the reality is from 1993 to the present day, Israeli soldiers disguised oftentimes as Palestinians, have entered Area A every day of every month of every year for the past 33 years. There was never any control given to the Palestinians, [00:23:30] not in Ramallah, in Jenin, and Nablus, and Gaza City, and Beit Hanina.
Nowhere in the occupied Palestinian territories did a single day go by over the past 33 years without Israel carrying out through its Duvdevan unit, the unit that carries out secret operations. they have not gone a single day without entering Area A. Because for Israel, it's all under their control.
I mean, Area A, B, and C is fiction. Israeli military controls the entire thing, and the proof of it is the Duvdevan unit brags [00:24:00] about how many operations they carry out in the West Bank and Gaza. This is going back decades. I mean, in the late '90s and early 2000s, you'd have Israeli military officials say publicly, "In the previous year, we carried out 300 operations in the Palestinian territories."
in Area A. They brag about it. So no, there was never any Palestinian control given to any Palestinians in any part of Palestine. That is all a fiction
Ezra Lipp: Thanks for clarifying that. Okay, so, it's summer 2006, Hamas [00:24:30] wins these elections. How does Israel and the international community respond? what is the aftermath of Hamas winning?
Zachary Foster: the initial reaction is one of shock. nobody thought Hamas would win. I don't even think Hamas thought they would win. But shortly thereafter, there are discussions between Hamas and Fatah to try to negotiate a peaceful handover of power. But the problem is that the United States government tells [00:25:00] then Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas,
they tell him, "Listen, you have two options. Either you form an emergency government without Hamas, even though you lost the election, or we cut off funding. Those are the two options. you either overthrow the results of democratic election, or you die, or you will be cut off from international funding, and you won't be able to pay your employees, and the Palestinian Authority institution will [00:25:30] collapse."
and those were the two options presented to Mahmoud Abbas. rah-rah democracy, right? I mean, the United States likes democracy only when the people we like win. When the people we like lose, the United States doesn't like democracy and prefers autocracy and military coups. so Fatah did what it was supposed to do.
It was beginning discussions and making preparations for a military coup. And the guy who was chiefly responsible for this in the Gaza Strip, his name is, Mahmoud Dahlan, I believe is his name, and he's a [00:26:00] Fatah, military figure and he was kind of the leading Fatah military figure in Gaza during this period after Hamas won the election. and basically what happens is Hamas gets word of this plot, right? They find out.
Ezra Lipp: there's also weapons shipments, right? To, uh, Fatah Fatah
Zachary Foster: exactly. so the US and Israel are basically arming these Fatah, militias in the Gaza Strip. Hamas learns of this, and Hamas after having won the democratic election, takes preemptative action, [00:26:30] to ensure they don't get couped and that led many people to say Hamas carried out the coup.
You can use whatever word you want to describe it. I think we all understand what happened, right? and then you get this mini civil war in Gaza in June 2007, after which point Hamas, wins the fight very easily, by the way. Like, they're by far the more powerful militia in Gaza at the time.
they destroy Fatah, and take over political power in the Gaza Strip, but not the West Bank
Ezra Lipp: Right. just to clarify, [00:27:00] like, the elections were supposedly, they would've governed, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, all the Palestinian territories, but they only retained control of the Gaza Strip, which further separated Palestinian governance, divide and conquer, however you wanna think about it.
Zachary Foster: That's right
Ezra Lipp: okay. So now let's talk about the blockade. I know there's a history of blockade in Gaza [00:27:30] that predates Hamas' coming to power. It also intensified after this election and, civil war trying to stave off a coup. but maybe you could give some brief context as to the history of blockade in Gaza and then how it developed, in the period we're currently talking about.
Zachary Foster: Yeah, so you could really date the origins of Israel's blockade of Gaza, and to a lesser extent the West Bank, to the early '90s. [00:28:00] Because, before 1991, Palestinians in the occupied territories could work in Israel. they didn't need a permit to work in Israel. they could just make their way to Israel.
If they found employment, they would be earning two, three, four, five times what they could make in Gaza or the West Bank. So it was incredibly lucrative. and something like
40% of the workforce in Gaza and 30% of the workforce in the West Bank were working in Israel on the eve of 1991. And then when Israel required Palestinians to apply for [00:28:30] permits, to work in Israel, they shattered the Palestinian economy, right? overnight, they basically made a third to, so 40% of the workforce precarious.
these people have no idea whether or not they're gonna, be able to feed their families tomorrow.
Ezra Lipp: Do you know what the impetus was for those permits?
Zachary Foster: And so this is during the First Intifada, right? So,
beginning in this, period of the first uprising, when Palestinians rose up in this leaderless uprising, sit-ins, boycotts, refusal to pay taxes, leafleting, [00:29:00] flyering, burning tires, throwing stones, Molotov cocktails, right?
It was basically an unarmed uprising. and it was causing Israel a lot of problems. And, during the first year of the uprising, Israel killed about 1,100 Palestinians. and I believe Palestinians killed about, maybe 130 or 140 Israelis. The vast majority of the Israelis killed being soldiers and security forces.
The vast majority of the Palestinians killed, civilians, many of them, children. and so it's a very violent period. And all the Israeli [00:29:30] leaders are trying to figure out what to do. Oh my God, turns out if you impose a belligerent military occupation on a people for two decades, eventually they resist.
Eventually they rise up, which is what happened. And so Israel's trying to figure out what to do, and they're imposing curfews, they're imposing lockdowns. Now they're gonna force Palestinians to require to apply for permits to work, right? and this has disastrous, consequences on the economies of Gaza and the West Bank.
and then it gets worse. basically throughout the '90s, they impose more restrictions. It's harder to get that work permit. and effectively what [00:30:00] Israel starts to do is they impose lockdowns, closures. in 1996, '97, Israel imposed a lockdown on
Gaza and the West Bank for about 100 days. you couldn't leave. It's not just you couldn't leave Gaza or the West Bank. There were Israeli soldiers stationed in and around all the major urban centers in occupied Palestine. You couldn't leave your refugee camp. You couldn't leave Gaza.
You couldn't leave, Gaza City. you couldn't leave Jabalia. You couldn't leave Rafah. you were locked in your city, in your town, in your [00:30:30] refugee camp. And you actually have about 70% unemployment in Gaza in the mid-'90s as a result. I mean, the World Food Program spins up an emergency food operation in 1995
Ezra Lipp: Because during those lockdowns, food wasn't getting in either, is that correct?
Zachary Foster: These people are going hungry. They have no work. They have no way to support themselves. They have no income. They're going hungry because they have no income. because Israel's not letting them leave their towns or their villages. so the World Food Program has to provide these people emergency food in the [00:31:00] mid-'90s during the peace process.
And then, of course, the peace process ends in failure and collapse, and you get the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000. we could talk about that. But basically, over this period of time, from the mid to late '90s all the way on to the early to mid-2000s, the occupation is getting worse and worse, right?
More checkpoints, more roadblocks, more settlements, more settler terrorism, more abductions, more, Palestinians imprisoned [00:31:30] for committing crimes in the future, more killings, more, injuries, more Palestinian women giving birth to dead children because of roadblocks. This is what occupation means, and it's getting worse and worse throughout this period.
And basically by 2006, after Hamas, wins that election in January, Israel says, "Okay, we've been letting some people in and out of Gaza from 2005 and 2006 and, and 2007." But Hamas won the election, and [00:32:00] you look at the charts of entry and exits into Gaza, it really falls off the cliff, like I said, in 2005 after disengagement.
That's the big cliff. But there's multiple cliffs, and in 2006 there's another cliff, and then in June to 2007, it's the last cliff, where it goes from like, a few tens of thousands of people are allowed to enter and exit Gaza every year. It goes from like low thousands to basically zero.
and that's to punish the people of Gaza for having elected Hamas.
Ezra Lipp: Yeah. it basically is transformed into an open air prison, to [00:32:30] use the common vernacular. and then so Israel imposes, in 2008 a further tightening of the blockade. is that correct? Where there's less, food coming in. maybe you could talk about Dov Weisglass and his policy that he articulates as far as, keeping Gaza on a diet.
Zachary Foster: Yeah, so the point of the blockade, was not to punish Hamas. You can punish Hamas in all kinds of ways. But the point of a blockade was to punish the [00:33:00] people of Gaza for having elected Hamas. And the way you punish people is you determine their caloric intake. And the plan that was, implemented was to count the calories needed by adult males, count the calories needed by adult females, and count the calories needed by children.
they get some number of calories that are needed every day, and that is roughly how many trucks would be allowed into Gaza, [00:33:30] right? It was a starvation plus diet. No, we're not gonna let these people starve. The world won't let us do that. That was Israel's belief at the time. Turns out Israel was actually wrong about that.
In 2024, the Hamas, I'm adopting Israeli propaganda rhetoric. The Gaza Health Ministry in Gaza recorded 440 deaths owing to starvation in 2024 and 2025. So Israel was wrong about that. Actually, they could have starved Palestinians, but they were at the time of the belief that the [00:34:00] world wouldn't let them do that, so they put the Palestinians on a starvation plus diet And so basically beginning in 2007, there's this long list of things that aren't allowed to enter Gaza.
Obviously concrete, all kinds of things that require use of metal, right? Because any kind of dual use object that could be repurposed or made into a weapon would be denied Gaza. Things like chocolate, things like cookies. at some point I believe certain types of tea were on the, list of banned [00:34:30] items.
I mean, just, regular everyday consumer goods that Israel banned because someone somewhere, thought these could be dual use items. So there's this long list of things you can't bring into Gaza. Israel does not allow enough fuel into Gaza. if you do the math on the average amount of fuel allowed into Gaza over the past, let's say, 18 years, pre-genocide, right?
So 2007 to 2023, Gaza was provided roughly about 50% of its energy needs. because the power plant [00:35:00] in Gaza, where does that power come from, right? Gaza it's sandy slopes on a beach. There's no coal, there's no oil, there's no natural gas in Gaza, so it all comes in from Israel, right?
That's why when Israel wants, it flips a switch and Gaza has no electricity. And so Israel provides Gaza about 50% of its electricity needs, roughly, on average, over the the 18 years or so leading up to the genocide. And what does that mean for your average Palestinian in Gaza? It means you [00:35:30] have raw sewage flowing through the streets of Gaza on a regular basis during that period of about 15, 16 years leading up to October 7th.
Ezra Lipp: how do you get raw sewage
Zachary Foster: you need electricity to filter raw sewage,
Ezra Lipp: I see. I see.
Zachary Foster: Like, you have raw sewage treatment facilities. facilities that turn poop water into something that's not toxic and you can release it. But they didn't have any electricity to turn poop water into normal water, so the poop water just flows through the streets of Gaza, [00:36:00] right?
or just gets dumped into the sea, the sea that Palestinians swim in, uh, which happened as well quite a bit. according to
the head physician in Shifa Hospital from basically the mid-2010s onwards documents every year you get an increase in the number of these diseases caused by untreated raw sewage. It's increasing about 10% to 15% every year. There's just more and more of these cases. It's getting worse and worse and worse.
yeah, because people are exposed to raw sewage, but of course, it's not just the raw sewage, right? it's everything. I mean, 75% youth unemployment [00:36:30] in Gaza on October 6, 2023. 75% youth unemployment. 50% of households dependent on food aid.
Ezra Lipp: just to reiterate, like this is because of the blockade which e-effectively cuts off their entire economy from any sort of, international trading, importing or exporting. Gazans are, are likely mostly not working in Israel anymore. their whole economy becomes reliant on humanitarian aid.
is that more or less [00:37:00] correct?
Zachary Foster: Yeah, 50% of households in Gaza would be going hungry if it weren't for humanitarian aid coming into the Gaza Strip through organizations like UNRWA, like WFP, right? Like Save the Children, like Amnesty, right? Like all these international organizations, obviously the UN and UNRWA being the biggest one by far, but you have many others, and they're the ones providing aid to Palestinians on the eve of October 7th.
And without that aid, you would've had literally hundreds of thousands of people starving to death Because there's no economy. In order to [00:37:30] have an economy, you need to be able to import and export things. You need to be in control of your borders, you need to have control over your economy if you want to be able to run an economy.
Israel was in complete control of the Palestinian economy, and Israel's goal was that the Palestinian economy of the Gaza Strip would be just above subsistence levels, would be a starvation plus economy
Ezra Lipp: So, would you say the main tactic now was to [00:38:00] just
manage the situation in Gaza, At that point, had they basically decided we're not actually gonna deal with the Palestinians in Gaza, and we just wanna keep them, a little more than starving in this open air prison and not try to think about it, the peace process is dead.
Like what is the mentality of the policies enacted by Israel?
Zachary Foster: So the political purpose of the siege and the blockade, and Israel's policies towards Gaza more generally, was to divide and [00:38:30] rule Palestinian society. was to keep the West Bank and Gaza divided, was to keep Hamas and Fatah divided, to ensure there would be no Palestinian, reconciliation government.
That was the point. Because if Gaza's blocked off from the world, how is Gaza gonna be able to create a reconciliation government with Fatah?
Ezra Lipp: they did try. They did attempt to.
Zachary Foster: they tried many times. They tried, it was a half dozen attempts, and they did sign multiple agreements multiple times, right?
[00:39:00] Go back to Cairo Accords, the Mecca Accords. there's literally a half dozen pieces of paper signed by Hamas and Fatah leaders in the decade and a half prior to October 7th, and every time US, Israeli's res- response was exactly the same: "We're not going to deal with a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation government unless Hamas throws away its political program."
Ezra Lipp: What was so threatening about Hamas's political program for Israel? And obviously [00:39:30] there's gonna be the stated reason and the real reason. but you know, it's my understanding that like Fatah, Hamas also said they would accept a, Palestinian sovereign state on the 1967 borders, basically, the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem,
That was the perceived, reasoning for the Oslo. Obviously, what was actually offered was far less than that. But what was so politically threatening about Hamas for Israel?
Zachary Foster: Yeah, let me just say one other thing though, with regard to the [00:40:00] previous question, which is it wasn't just that you needed to keep Hamas and Fatah divided, but you needed to keep Hamas alive. If Hamas was destroyed, like many Israeli leaders talked about doing, right? Every time there would be a rocket, empty field next to Sderot was annihilated, by a unguided Hamas rocket, an Israeli leader would say, "We need to annihilate Hamas," right?
"We need to destroy Hamas." And every leader in 2008 and '09 said that when Israel carpet bombed Gaza for the first time, and then they said that again in [00:40:30] 2012, "We need to annihilate Hamas." And then they said the same thing in four- 2014, "We need to annihilate Hamas." But they didn't. They kept Hamas alive.
They wanted Hamas alive. They needed Hamas alive. and they said this openly, right? There's a Netanyahu, a statement from 2019, I believe Smotrich said something even earlier than that. But it had been the unofficial Israeli policy going back more than a decade, already from the late 2000s, 2010s, was that if Hamas is in power, the international community considers Hamas a [00:41:00] terrorist organization, and the international community is not willing to deal with them.
So therefore, we don't have to talk to the Palestinians. We can continue to pursue forever apartheid, forever Jewish supremacy, forever Jewish expansion, forever Jewish development from the river to the sea, and we don't have to, even talk to these people. so they needed Hamas, alive but weak.
Right. So the reason Hamas was so threatening was because you would have to make real concessions to Hamas. if you want Hamas to [00:41:30] stop, attacking Israeli military bases, and firing rockets at Israeli civilian population centers, well, guess what? You're gonna need to make real concessions.
these aren't, Palestinian Authority pushovers. You can't just dictate the terms of negotiations with these people and accept them to accept permanent apartheid as a solution. That's not how these people work. These are the hardliners, right? These are people you actually, if you want them to give up their guns, you gotta make concessions.
You [00:42:00] gotta actually end the occupation. You gotta actually make Jerusalem the capital of Palestine. You gotta actually come up with some serious mutually agreeable and just resolution to the Palestinian refugee issue, You have to deal with borders. You have to give Palestinians control over their airspace and the groundwater and the surface water and the rivers and the coastline.
You have to actually give Palestinians real control. That's why Hamas was so dangerous. I mean, if you look at [00:42:30] Hamas's, political program going, let's say, back to the early 2000s when they were starting to talk, especially in the lead-up to that 2006 election, you have Palestinian political leaders, people like Ismail Haniyeh, publishing in Western outlets.
I believe Ismail Haniyeh publishes an op-ed in The Guardian. And then you have Khaled Meshaal, I believe, publishes an article in CNN. This is back when CNN and Guardian were, like, interviewing Hamas officials. And basically, if you read those interviews and those articles, you would [00:43:00] come to the conclusion that Hamas is plagiarizing international law because they're plagiarizing Resolution 181 and 242 and the two-state solution framework, right?
Like, the pre-Oslo
Ezra Lipp: by plagiarizing meaning they're just saying we want international law to be applied to our situation and
respected?
Zachary Foster: Sorry. I'm using plagiarizing in
the good sense here. Sorry. Plagiarizing like the law.
Ezra Lipp: yeah.
Zachary Foster: Yeah, like, they're like, "If you withdraw from the [00:43:30] territories you illegally invaded and occupied beginning on June 6, 1967, you allow us to establish our capital in Jerusalem, which is part of those territories you illegally occupied in '67, and we come up with a, a mutually agreeable and just resolution to the refugee issue-" like we're done.
The conflict's over. That's why they were so dangerous, right? Because their demands were so reasonable and so consistent with what the US and the UK and the EU and China and Russia were all saying [00:44:00] also needs to happen, which is a two-state solution based on the June 5th, 1967 lines, the quote unquote green line.
Right? That was what everyone agreed on. It was like there was no debate in the international community about what needed to happen. Everyone understood what needed to happen. The problem, of course, was that for this, two-state solution to come into existence, Israel would've had to make all the concessions.
What concessions should the Palestinians have to make? Just I guess stop killing Israelis, right? [00:44:30] Which is of course what they're agreeing to do when they say, "We agree to a two-state solution." It's like, "We're gonna stop killing Israeli soldiers and civilians." That's basically all the Palestinian power.
The only power on the side of the Palestinians is to just end any kind of resistance. Like, they don't have anything to give up. They have nothing. They're powerless. They don't control any land. They don't control any territory. They don't control any borders. They don't control any resources. they don't have many weapons.
Like, that's what they have to offer is like, "We will give up our weapons if you [00:45:00] just, share power and don't dominate us forever in an apartheid state." that's the trade,and that's basically really if you look at the history of these negotiations and these discussions and the peace process, it's always a question of what is Israel gonna give up, and who's gonna pressure them to give that up?
Because the Palestinians have nothing to give up. there's no hostages left. What else do you want the Palestinians to do? they even agreed to disarm just a few weeks ago. Hamas said, "We'll give up our weapons. All you gotta do is give us a credible path towards statehood, and you gotta [00:45:30] withdraw from our territory and stop killing us."
The things you already agreed to do in October 2025. what is Hamas left to give? They've given everything. what they have left to do now is just die. That's it.
Ezra Lipp: So there's some other elements of this, main myth another element is this, tunnel network. And the way that it's often described in pro-Israel talking [00:46:00] points is these terror tunnels that Hamas built exclusively to,
and often it'll say they built it under hospitals and under mosques, so, using civilians as human shields. certainly some of these tunnels were used for military activity, but it is my understanding that, the majority of them, and I think also perhaps a different network, were used for shipments of goods to combat, the blockade that was imposed on them.
So can you talk about this tunnel network? What was the context behind it? what was it actually used [00:46:30] for?
Zachary Foster: Yeah, so I, let me just take a step back here because I think the broader question around like Palestinian armament is a bit problematic because, you don't really hear any conversations or discussions around Israel's misuse of, misappropriation of public funds for military purposes.
when have you heard someone talk about, how Um, Israel spends, I think, 10th most on their military in the world, right? they spend more, I think, than every other country except for about 10, even though it's [00:47:00] a tiny country with 10 million people. they have a nuclear arsenal. A couple hundred warheads is the estimate.
They spend more per capita on their income than the vast majority of countries in the world, even though 25% of the Israeli population lives under the poverty line. while the country spends tens of billions of dollars every year on arms and bombs and weapons and guns and tanks and drones.
And there's no discussion about [00:47:30] that. There's no discussion about how Israel is making its own people suffer so that it can murder Palestinians. How come no one talks about that? But let's all focus on the, how Palestinians are using their money on tunnels rather than building the Singapore, on the Mediterranean, right?
So At the level of the framing of the conversation, there's a massive double standard, right?
That's the first point. But yeah, Hamas is, building tunnels beginning in the early 2000s because they're living under a blockade. if this was a normal [00:48:00] place and this was a normal country, they wouldn't build tunnels.
They would just do things in the open. But this is not a normal place. They're living under a belligerent military occupation, so they can't just trade with Egypt like any normal country would do. They have to build tunnels underground to trade with Egypt, which is, of course, what they did in the early 2000s.
And then, of course, they're not like any normal country. they can't build military facilities above ground, 'cause if they do, they'll just be bombed. So they had to take the same strategy that Iran adopted, right?
that the [00:48:30] Vietnamese adopted during the Vietnam War. Any government, any regime, any militia that is facing, an adversary far more powerful and far more better equipped and better armed than itself, it has to build underground. That's the only option, right? If they don't build underground, they just get slaughtered.
Israel will just carpet bomb the place, which is what they've done. Israel has proven that. They would just be bombed to death. so of course Is- Hamas is gonna build tunnels. that's their only option. It's either build tunnels or [00:49:00] die
Ezra Lipp: I, I know you just addressed this a little bit, but how substantial are these claims that, Hamas diverts funds for the personal wealth of their leaders, locally or abroad as opposed to helping the people of Gaza? Is there anything to this or is this just Hasbara?
Zachary Foster: it's a good question. If I had to summarize the attitude of the average Palestinian towards the Hamas leadership on Gaza on October 6th, 2023, first of all, it's very hard to know. Let's just state the [00:49:30] obvious. public opinion polling is much harder to do in places where you have autocratic regimes than when you have democratic regimes.
Hamas is an autocratic regime more so than it is a democratic regime. So to what extent polling data existed at all, I don't know if I've even come across many polls on how popular Hamas is on the eve of October 7th. but I get the sense that it's like any other government, where you basically have a lot of criticism directed at the government.
I mean, go anywhere in the world, you will find lots and lots of criticism directed towards the government. The criticism [00:50:00] that I had heard most was that the government was basically trying to compete in the economy, right? So Hamas would establish Hamas strawberry fields or a Hamas factory to produce soap, Hamas fishermen, right?
They're competing in the private sector against regular Palestinians. and they obviously have an advantage 'cause they're associated with the government. and Palestinians didn't like that. And they were doing a lot of things also that Palestinians didn't like in the Gaza Strip.
Like, they were harassing a lot of the street vendors. Spoke [00:50:30] to some street vendors in Gaza, and they said they're constantly having to move there 'cause the Hamas police would come and force them to close their shop. They didn't have the right permits, and they're just getting harassed.
And they were also, doing similar things to taxi drivers on the eve of October 7th, causing problems for them. but these are... you have to understand that the goal of Israel is to paint Hamas as, Nazism times infinity. And the goal of the United States and its allies, and the goal of most Zionists around the world [00:51:00] is to make you think Hamas is like the Nazis, but worse.
And so their goal is to make you think Hamas is pure evil. but that's just completely disconnected from the reality on the ground, which is they're like any other government. Some people like them, some people don't like them. they're probably not that efficient, or they're probably not that competent.
there's too much bureaucracy. they're religious. I'm not religious, so there's that.
Ezra Lipp: It's worth saying they never even, formed the, the movement [00:51:30] to be a governing body in the first place. It was a resistance movement
Zachary Foster: yeah, but again, I think the underlying problem here is, whatever you wanna criticize Hamas for, they're living under a state of permanent belligerent military occupation where every couple of years Israel goes in and carpet bombs a place, or Israel goes in and abducts a bunch of people, or Israel goes in and assassinates a bunch of people.
Or if you protest nonviolently like you did during the Gaza March of Return in 2018, '19, you just get [00:52:00] slaughtered 253 people were, assassinated by snipers, and another 6,000 were permanently wounded for life, uh, we're talking, Israeli snipers targeting people in their kneecaps and their spines so they would be permanently paralyzed, right?
on one day the snipers go after the genitals, and the next day they go after the kneecaps 'cause they're working on their target practice, that's the daily life for Palestinians, and that's the daily life for the Hamas government, is your ability to govern is itself being micromanaged [00:52:30] by an apartheid state that is suffocating you and besieging you and controlling you and denying you electricity and denying you food and denying you fuel and making your life miserable
Ezra Lipp: so a common talking point is that, Gaza wouldn't have all these problems if Hamas just stopped killing Israeli civilians. this period we're covering, we haven't talked about the six major, wars [00:53:00] between Israel and Hamas.
but maybe we could start in the period of the Second Intifada when, suicide bombings, attacks on Israeli civilians really picked up from Hamas and also other, armed resistance factions in Gaza. and maybe we could talk about, why this was a tactic that these groups kept on trying, the Israeli response,
why it got to be like this.
Zachary Foster: Yeah, so during the Second Intifada, which was, [00:53:30] like I said, the most violent period in all of Israel-Palestine history to date, at least for Israelis and Palestinians. the Second Intifada, you could say, was kicked off when Ariel Sharon, who was then an Israeli opposition figure, he took this provocative tour around the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the holiest site to Palestinian Muslims, the third holiest site to Muslims, in order to assert Israeli sovereignty and Israeli control over this holy Palestinian and Muslim site.[00:54:00]
Next day, you get huge protests, and in the following three weeks, Israeli security officials slaughter about 40 to 50 Palestinians, mostly children, and most of the children who were killed were shot in the head. we're talking, September 2000. And most of the Israeli security officials who have spoken about, this period, these three or four weeks in September 2000 that really kicked off the Second Intifada, what they say is, "We were instructed to, to be extra [00:54:30] brutal." to kill Palestinians, not, like, injure them in the arm, but, like, shoot them in the head.
and those were, instructions that were passed down to Israeli security officials in the aftermath of those protests, and it led to, like we said, the most violent period to date, during which time, Palestinians killed about 1,000 Israelis or so, mostly civilians, right? these are the infamous cafe bombs and bus bombs
and then Israel killed about 3,300 Palestinians, right? So it's always, this is sort of Israeli military logic, right? You always have to kill way more [00:55:00] Palestinians, than Palestinians kill Israelis. but that was a very, very brutal period of Israeli, Palestinian history.
Ezra Lipp: is it worth mentioning this doctrine, I don't know if you'd call it a doctrine, but, this concept of the balance of terror
Zachary Foster: So I think if you look at the trajectory of Hamas andPalestinian Islamic Jihad, basically you would find that before 1994, you have very few, quote-unquote, "suicide attacks" or like, attacks where they're really just going after killing a bunch of Israeli [00:55:30] civilians.
there are some, but not so many. And then really what happens is the, Jewish American Baruch Goldstein enters the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in 1994 during Ramadan, with an assault rifle, with an automatic weapon, and murders about 28 Palestinian worshipers
And after that, Palestinians, belonging to Hamas and Islamic Jihad start to carry out, suicide attacks, start to target Israeli civilians. there's a really good New Yorker piece where, I forget the name [00:56:00] of the journalist who went around and interviewed all of these fighters, all these, uh,uh, PIG and Hamas fighters, and basically what she says is they all say the same thing, that they, embrace these tactics for the same reason, that Baruch Goldstein did, right?
If they're gonna kill our children, we're gonna kill theirs. It's just eye for an eye, right? that's the attitude. and remember the '90s, the peace process is a very violent, brutal period for Palestinians. From '93 to 2000, Israel kills about 700 Palestinians.
This is during the peace process, right? Like very brutal [00:56:30] time.
Ezra Lipp: Not much an a mass settlement expansion into the area that was supposedly going to be the Palestinian state
Zachary Foster: Uh, e-exactly right. The killing is just the tip of the spear, right? Then they're, confiscating more Palestinian land, destroying more Palestinian olive groves, building more Israeli settlements, confining Palestinians into smaller and smaller areas of Gaza and the West Bank, imposing lockdowns and checkpoints and roadblocks on them, a-arresting their youth, imprisoning them, abducting them, torturing them in prison [00:57:00] for crimes they've committed in the future.
You've heard that correctly. so that's what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, and so the Palestinians say, "Well, listen, if you're gonna slaughter us, if you're gonna kill our innocent, we're gonna kill your innocent, eye for an eye." And that's, that's sort of the Palestinian justification. And of course, there's no justification to my mind to killing innocent people, to killing civilians.
but that's the justification they take.
Ezra Lipp: what is this arresting people or punishing them for future crimes
Zachary Foster: Right. So, the Israeli practice of administrative detention, [00:57:30] that's what it's called in Israel. But I would call it hostage-taking, because you're not bringing forward any charges. You're abducting a person and, based upon secret evidence, so the person being abducted is not able to know what crime they've committed.
and that secret evidence that they're not allowed to see, could be for a crime that they're going to commit in the future. So the argument that a lawyer would present to the Israeli military judge in these [00:58:00] Kafkaesque courts, which have 99.7% conviction rates, is that this Palestinian could commit a crime in the future, and that crime that they could commit in the future is based on secret evidence that the Palestinian is not able to see. And that's what they're being arrested for. And there's about 3,300 of these, administrative detainees, again, I would call them hostages, sitting in Israel's torture dungeons, which to the best of my knowledge, are the most well-documented rape [00:58:30] facilities on planet Earth. I'm not saying more people aren't being raped in Eritrean prisons or North Korean prisons.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that Israeli prisons, there's much, much, much better, like by perhaps multiple orders of magnitude better documentation to prove that Israeli security officials are systematically raping Palestinian prisoners. We have dozens of reports now in which literally hundreds of [00:59:00] Palestinians have come forward and say, "We've been raped in Israeli."
Not just,the Palestinian, but their name, when they were raped, in which Israeli prison, on which day, how they were raped, with which objects. We know the details. We have the receipts. We have video evidence as well, and we have testimonies of Israeli soldiers in addition to hundreds of Palestinian detainees.
It's the most well-documented network of rape dungeons on planet Earth
Ezra Lipp: [00:59:30] All right. Well, let's get back to this years or so leading up to October 7th, I don't think we need to get into every single war that happened and all the details, but perhaps we could tease out some kind of patterns because again, this dominant narrative is that [01:00:00] Hamas just keeps lobbing rockets across the borders and breaking ceasefires.
when you study the history, you see actually it is mostly the opposite. That is, it is usually a response to Israeli aggression. Hamas continuously offers ceasefires or long-term truces that Israel rejects. Israel continues to assassinate some of the very leaders that are offering those ceasefires.
So maybe you could, the relevant details of these wars that happened [01:00:30] during this time
Zachary Foster: Yeah, so there were about five or six wars or so, 2008, '09, 2012, 2014, 2018, '19, and 2021, and then obviously 2023 to the present. And there were other smaller skirmishes and battles intermixed between those, but those are the big ones, and each one follows a similar trajectory. It's tit for tat escalates into a war At the end of the war, a ceasefire deal is signed.
During the war, Israel [01:01:00] kills between 10 and 100 times as many Palestinians as Palestinians kill Israelis. Actually, it's more like between, 10 and infinity times, because, for example, in 2018, '19, Israeli soldiers killed about 253 Palestinians, injured 6,000, and suffered zero casualties, right?
But in 2008 and '09, it was a handful of Israelis were killed and, about 1,500 Palestinians were killed, I believe, 1,100 of whom I believe were civilians. In 2014, maybe 50 to [01:01:30] 100 Israelis were killed, almost all of them soldiers, 'cause in 2014 they actually invaded with ground troops.
Bunch of soldiers got killed during the illegal invasion. and of course, something like 2,400 Palestinians were killed during that 2014 war, 550 of whom were children. So the numbers are always like one to, to infinity. Like one order of magnitude to infinity orders of magnitude more Palestinians killed than Israelis.
That's the nature of these wars, and then at the end of the war, there's always a ceasefire deal. and the story with the ceasefire is always the same, And I wrote a long piece [01:02:00] on this, you can, check the details and the receiptsin the piece I wrote, but it's the same story.
It's Israel by and large violates the ceasefire, and the Palestinians by and large live up to the ceasefire. that's how it always works. There's no exceptions. It's always the same. and people who have been watching over the past three years are just sort of like, "Well,
obviously, right? But people didn't realize that that's how ceasefires work with Israel. those of us who have been paying attention for a long time could have told you how these ceasefires were gonna work. And by the way, since 2023, it's [01:02:30] the exact same story, During that November 2023 ceasefire, it was about 10 days or so, there was a brief, exchange of captives and hostages.
Israel violated that ceasefire multiple times. There was another ceasefire in January 2025. That was the one Trump, imposed on Israel, right before he came into office in January 2025. Israel violated that ceasefire left and right. a day did not go by during that January ceasefire, during which time Israel didn't bomb Gaza. [01:03:00] And then in March 2025, Israel just said, "You know what? Fuck the ceasefire. Like, the ceasefire we weren't paying attention to, we're just gonna throw in the trash bin." And on one day, on March 18th, Israel carpet bombed Gaza and killed Like over 500 people. It was one of the deadliest days in Gaza, ever in the history of Gaza, and that was during a ceasefire.
So Israel was just like, "You know what? We, we're not really into ceasefires anymore." So they just threw that in the garbage. And then again, Israel signs another ceasefire with Hamas on October, was it 9th or 10th, 2025. This is, uh, [01:03:30] eight months later. And since October, 2025, it's been almost a year, Israel's killed another 1,300 Palestinians and has not lived up to a single, element, a single line item in that ceasefire deal.
they didn't even live up to the captive exchange and the hostage deal part of the ceasefire. they were supposed to release a certain number of Palestinian detainees. They didn't release that many, and then the ones they did release, they dumped into Egypt or Jordan rather than uniting them with their families in Gaza and the West [01:04:00] Bank.
that was like the easiest thing for them to, commit to, 'cause it's very exact and precise what you're supposed to do. Release this many people to these places, and they didn't even do that, let alone letting in temporary shelters or caravans or the number of trucks and fuel and food and medicine, right?
they, they don't even allow tents 'cause the metal poles are dual use objects. They don't allow caravans. you have 1.9 million people living in tents. They won't allow any shelters into Gaza. They won't allow fresh fruits [01:04:30] and fresh vegetables. there was UN agency that documents, the UN agency in charge of determining, things like famine, malnutrition, food insecurity.
They published a report a few weeks ago that by the way, pro-Israel people are loving this report because it also shows there isn't all that much, extreme malnutrition, like the most severe malnutrition that you're about to die from. That has been mostly, reduced to zero.
But, between 50% and 60% of Gazan children have had no fruits and no vegetables since the ceasefire, They're eating just canned [01:05:00] food. There's no meat going in.
So they have a terrible diet. And they also determined about 10% to 15% of Gazan children are permanently stunted for life. This is the report Israel is bragging about, that they permanently stunted the growth of one out of every seven Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip, and they're bragging about it. Okay, so this is the state of affairs today. They violate every ceasefire they ever signed, past and present
Ezra Lipp: I think it's also worth stating to just back up for a second that during this period [01:05:30] when Hamas was governing in Gaza under Israeli control and blockade, these wars and these retaliation for various acts that escalated into full-blown wars, you can't even make the argument that, well, if Hamas just stopped responding, their problems would go away.
Because the problem is in these periods of calm, the blockade is still there. Like the crushing of the economy is still there. So Israel's grip on Gaza is an act of violence in [01:06:00] itself. So even in the absence of, armed violence, rocket fire, Israeli shellings, bombings, aerial bombardment, like even in these, periods of relative calm, Israel's is committing grave violence and collective punishment on the entire Palestinian society in Gaza.
Zachary Foster: In 1967, when Israel attacked the Egyptian Air Force on June 5th, their argument was that Egypt had declared war on Israel because it imposed a partial [01:06:30] blockade of the State of Israel. Israel's southern port, the Straits of Tiran, were blockaded by Egypt in May 1967. And Israel said, "Look, voila, that's an act of war. You just declared war on us because you partially blockaded one of our ports." Now, wait for it. If that was considered an act of war, what that means is, according to Israel's own admission, Israel has been engaged in an act of war. They've been [01:07:00] declaring war on Gaza every minute of every day of every year since June 2007 By their own admission
Ezra Lipp: Yeah.
couple other things I wanna get to. This has been incredibly informative and I so appreciate you, so most conversations about Hamas, with Zionists, with pro-Israel people, or just people that just don't know a lot, start and end with a couple of [01:07:30] points.
One refers to the 1988 charter, and the other is this idea of, Hamas as just this, Islamist movement and equating them to other transnational Islamic groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, and saying their goal is violent jihad. w- we sh- we should acknowledge that in the 1988 charter, there is maximalist language, there is anti-Semitic [01:08:00] language.
but perhaps you couldoffer some greater contextualization, around these topics.
Zachary Foster: Yeah. So just one quick point, which is I would say the key difference between the Hamas charter of '88 and the Likud charter of '76 Because, Likud is controlling the Israeli government. Hamas is controlling the government in Gaza. They both have these very old charters. I would say the key difference is that Hamas has, revised that '88 charter with a 2017 charter, that explains the [01:08:30] enemy is not the Jews, it's the Zionists.
of course, on the Likud side, no revision has been made. The policy remains, to the present day, Jewish supremacy, Nazism from the river to the sea. There shall only be Jewish control. There shall only be Jewish domination. The Palestinians should be permanent slaves to the state of Israel. So that's the difference between the, let's say the Palestinian right and the Israeli right wing. the Palestinian right wing has I think evolved and revised its [01:09:00] positions. The Israeli right wing has actually doubled down, and actually even become more extreme over the years.
That's the key difference. as far as the Hamas charter goes love that people wanna talk about Hamas in 1988, 'cause it's a fascinating, a period of time that, I've done some research into, and I'm happy to talk about it. I find it funny that it's Zionists that wanna talk about that period, because if you go back to 1988 and you actually understand what Hamas was at the time.
this was an organization [01:09:30] that over the past, decade and a half or so, it was founded in the early 1970s by a guy named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was violently expelled from his home in 1948 when he was 13 years old, and made into a stateless, property-less refugee for the rest of his life.
That guy founded this organization. At the time it was called Al-Mujamma Al-Islami, the Islamic Collective, in 1973. And they focused on Islamic preaching, right? It's an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood. [01:10:00] They are all about women's empowerment and, they're all about, programming for schools and afterschool programming for kids, right?
it's a charity organization. They found orphanages, and clinics, and obviously preaching, right? it's Islamic organization. And then over the years, basically in the 1980s, this organization receives funding and support from the Israeli government because it's an apolitical organization, doesn't get involved in politics.
But [01:10:30] the Israel thinks it could act as a counterweight to the PLO, which Israel believes it's its true adversary at the time. And Israel does what every other colonial power has ever done, you wanna divide and rule the colonized society to make it weak and undefensible. And that's exactly what Israel does.
By empowering Hamas, at the time known as the Islamic Collective, they think they can weaken the PLO led by Yasser Arafat. And obviously it blew up in their [01:11:00] face, but in December 1987, you get this Israeli truck driver kills four Palestinians in Gaza, and this leads to the outbreak of the First Intifada.
And at that time, Hamas is still not called Hamas. they're called the Islamic Collective. But very quickly, it's obvious that, this is the most significant challenge to Israeli occupation and Israeli domination to date. You get this spontaneous leaderless uprising, right?
It's real, it's like real grassroots organizing, right? You get these popular committees [01:11:30] and, I mean, it's,it's like if you had to like dream up what civil resistance and civil society resistance grassroots, would look like, it's like the First Intifada. You know? It's like wow, really cool stuff. and Hamas is like, we can't just sit this out."
"We're against occupation, too." and basically that's when Hamas says, "Okay, we're gonna join the struggle." They call themselves Hamas, and in February they send their, third in command, his name is Mahmoud Ishtar, they send him to Tel Aviv to meet [01:12:00] with then Israeli, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.
They have a meeting. Nothing comes of it. He goes back, Mahmoud Ishtar goes back to Tel Aviv. Now we're in June 1988, and he presents to then Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin. he outlines basically a peace plan, and he says, "Look, if you guys declare your intention to end the occupation, you don't have to end the occupation, you just have to declare your intention to end it.
Allow us [01:12:30] Palestinians in the occupied territories to hold free and fair elections so we can elect leaders to represent us to negotiate with you, and you release the thousands of Palestinians you've arrested." Right? Because this is the First Intifada. Israel was just going up, arresting little kids and imprisoning little kids.
thousands of Palestinians were sitting in Israel's torture dungeons. "So if you allow us to have free and fair elections, declare your intent to end the Israeli occupation, and release Palestinian prisoners, we're [01:13:00] open to negotiating peace with you." Hamas put forward a peace offer in June 1988, two months before the charter.
But what was Israel's response? They laughed. They said, "End the occupation? End settlements?" "What are you, crazy?" over the past six years, from 1982 to 1988, Israel tripled its settler population. Israel was going into, like, settler expansion hyper-growth mode. this was the most intensive period of Israeli [01:13:30] expansion entrench, intensive intensification and entrenchment of Israeli control and domination of the occupied territories.
They weren't gonna withdraw. They laughed at him, and he went back to Gaza. Two months later, they adopt the charter. And then why did they adopt that charter? What's happening in Gaza at the time? During the first year of the Intifada in Gaza, the Israeli military kills 142 Palestinians, if I'm not wrong.
Maybe it's 141 Palestinians in Gaza, [01:14:00] and they suffer one casualty. Right? So at the time when Hamas is like, "We're gonna now embrace violence to solve the occupation," what is happening to them at that time? They're being slaughtered. Their children are being gunned down in the streets. Yitzhak Rabin says, "Break the bones of the five-year-old Palestinian children."
20% of the Palestinian children whose bones were broken by Israeli soldiers during the First Intifada were under the age of five years old. [01:14:30] I mean, you have Israeli soldiers tormenting, torturing, slaughtering, brutalizing, imposing curfews, maiming, abducting Palestinians every day.
And it takes six months of Israeli soldiers brutalizing, terrorizing, slaughtering Palestinians before the Hamas charter comes out, before Hamas says, "You know what? If you guys are gonna slaughter us, well, guess what? We're gonna use violence against you, too."
Ezra Lipp: And [01:15:00] I mean, it just... Yitzhak Rabin, who said, "Break the bones of the Palestinian children," he is seen as, the most peacenik, you know, Israeli dove, architect of the peace process.
Zachary Foster: that's not a coincidence obviously, right? So the only Israeli leader who's ever able to actually come out and say, "Oh, I support peace," Even if they actually support permanent occupation, which was the case with Rabin. He never was planning to give Palestinians a state. In fact, in the last speech he gave before he was assassinated in [01:15:30] 1995, he said in the Israeli parliament, he said, "We're gonna give Palestinians less than a state."
Right? So there was never a plan to give Palestinians a state. in his election campaigning, leading up to his victory in, '92 or '93? he campaigned on pushing Gaza into the sea and getting Gaza out of Tel Aviv. He campaigned on effectively genocidal slogans, okay? So again, the only way an Israeli leader, the only way, you ever got close to someone like Rabin, someone even close to someone who was actually, prepared to, [01:16:00] maybe sort of give Palestinians kind of some control, but not a state, is if you had proven yourself to be someone who was so brutal towards the Palestinians, now you've earned the trust and respect of Israeli society.
Now you have the political maneuvering ability to make a concession like that. The same was true of Ariel Sharon, The same was true of every, Shimon Peres, right? Every Israeli dove, before they became a, quote-unquote, "dove," the Israeli version of a dove, which is [01:16:30] a permanent apartheid, permanent occupation.
But in the Israeli version of dove, they had to have been, a war criminal before that
Ezra Lipp: So, as far as the Hamas charter, there is language that talks about like, "We will murder every Jew." in that time, I know they've changed it.
and now Hamas officially, specifically separates out Jews and Judaism with Zionism, and they say their problem is with the, Zionist occupation, not of [01:17:00] Jews in general, why do you think they use such maximalist language?
it is an interesting question because I could even say if there was actual antiJewish sentiment, I can understand that. I mean, the Jews were the people that were dominating their lives,
um, murdering their children.
Zachary Foster: Like even to this day, right, if you go around the West Bank, Gaza and you use the phrase "El Yehud," the Jews, you're basically referring to the Israeli army, right? [01:17:30] if you were living in Palestine in1947 and 1948,let's say before May 15th, 1948, these were called Jewish militias not Israeli or Zionist militias,
Because they were Jewish militias. Like all the people in the militias were Jewish, and these were Jewish colonies because all the people in these Zionist colonies were Jewish, it was Jewish colonization because the plan was to colonize Palestine with Jews. So, Jews were the problem to [01:18:00] Palestinians,
Ezra Lipp: Yeah
Zachary Foster: and we're uncomfortable saying that in the West because there's all these Jews living in America who have nothing to do with the Jews who colonized Palestine, right?
and like there are a lot of Jews that find that whole project to be abhorrent, like me and you. and there are even Jews who might have even picked up a weapon and fought against the Zionists. but we have to remember that we're talking about a Jewish movement of Jewish [01:18:30] colonizers to establish Jewish colonies, to establish a Jewish majority, where there would be Jewish-run schools only for Jews, and there would be Jewish-run hospitals, and it would be Jewish, run bureaucracies, and it would be a Jewish-run army where all the soldiers would be Jewish, and that's what the whole idea of Zionism was.
So of course, the people who are subject to that are gonna call those people Jews. and we don't like that. We wanna call it Zionist rather than Jewish because we know that there are Jews outside of those Jewish [01:19:00] colonizers who exist and who oppose it. But to the Palestinians, they're Jews
Ezra Lipp: Okay. we discussed a little bit about the various, wars that happened in Gaza and, another important aspect of them is that the Gazan people were largely, blocked from rebuilding, so
Israel would come in and do a large aerial bombardment campaign. as you said, Israel holds a tight blockade. so they're not [01:19:30] able to, often get the reconstruction materials needed. So basically, life keeps on getting worse and worse for the people of Gaza leading up to 2023.
There is another element of this that I think is worth discussing, I'm just trying to paint a picture of where we are the eve of October 7th, so to speak, which is, the Abraham Accords and the more normalization, attempts, with other Arab countries that Israel and the US are, doing.
[01:20:00] How does that affect, Hamas and the greater Palestinian movements thinking about their situation?
Zachary Foster: I do think it has an effect. I think it does play a important role in Hamas' decision to launch the October 7th attacks. Because on the eve of October 7th, the Palestinian issue has fallen off the world agenda, so much so that you have countries as important in the Muslim Arab world as Saudi Arabia,
the custodian of the Holy Mosque in Mecca and [01:20:30] Medina. this country, is now in serious discussions with Israel around normalization without Israel having to make any concessions to the Palestinians, for Mohammed bin Salman, the Palestinians make no difference at all.
I mean, that was certainly what, Hamas is worried about on the eve of October 7th.
Ezra Lipp: I'll just interrupt real quick and maybe you could speak to this, but like all these normalizations with these countries, these are largely, as I understand it, reflections of the oftentimes corrupt leadership of those countries, not necessarily their populations which [01:21:00] do have a lot of sympathy and solidarity with Palestinians.
Zachary Foster: That's correct. So the four countries that signed this normalization, deal with Israel: Morocco, UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan, We know what's in it for Israel. Israel wants acceptance in the world. It wants acceptance in the Arab and Muslim worlds, now why do those four countries wanna sign a normalization deal with Israel?
Ask yourself that. What's in it for them?
weapons and [01:21:30] spy tech. So Israel's weapons industry is about, couple tens of billions a year, 20 or 30 billion.
It's increasing, right? I believe 25% of all the weapons sold by the state of Israel in 2024 were sold to those four countries. 25% of the weapons Israel sold, we're talking billions of dollars in arms, and spy tech, and all kinds of, very nefarious technology, was sold to those four governments who are interested in spying on their own populations.
[01:22:00] that's what the weapons are for, right? UAE's not worried about a foreign invasion. maybe now they are after the Iran war, but basically before that, when these deals were signed, the UAE was not worried about foreign governments, foreign countries, posing a threat to them.
No. They're worried about their own populations because they're deeply unpopular, because these governments are unelected and unaccountable to anyone, and so they're all worried. Morocco's worried, UAE's worried, Sudan's worried, [01:22:30] Bahrain's
Ezra Lipp: They're
worried about civilian uprising?
Zachary Foster: That's correct.
In Bahrain, you have a majority Shiite population being, ruled by Sunni monarchy, right?
They're worried as fuck. I mean, go to Morocco.
Moroccan people are still like some of the most pro-Palestine people on Earth. The Moroccan government is in bed with Israel. Trade deals, economic deals, weapons deals. That's what it's all about. It's these countries are scared shitless of their own populations, and they need the best military [01:23:00] tech to spy on and suppress their own populations, and the best tech for that is Israel.
Well, why does Israel have the best spy tech? Because they've been spying on millions of Palestinians for decades. That's why
Ezra Lipp: Yeah. And just to state the obvious, the normalization with these countries basically from the Palestinian perspective, their cause gets more and more ignored, as far as world geopolitics.
Zachary Foster: Yeah, that, that's exactly right. From the Palestine point of view, your [01:23:30] best hope for bringing an end to the occupation is that these Arab and Muslim powers, to the extent that they have any power left, to the extent that they're not under the complete control of the United States government, that they act on behalf of the Palestinians.
'Cause they have some power. They have oil. They have large populations. They represent, Arab and Muslim worlds, these countries are not nothing. They have some influence, some power, some leverage. They can use that power and influence and leverage on [01:24:00] behalf of the Palestinians if they so choose.
And by signing these agreements with Israel, what they're saying is, "We're not gonna use our power and our leverage and our influence on behalf of the Palestinians. We're not gonna do that. We're just gonna let you suffer and die."
Ezra Lipp: Yeah. one other thing we didn't quite touch on, but I mentioned earlier is how important is this idea of Islam, Islamism as when it comes to Hamas?
it's a political organization, uh, and it's a militant [01:24:30] organization, and it's an Islamic organization. It's all three, right? And so you're gonna get a range of perspectives on how much violence to use, on how to negotiate in political talks with Israel, and on how religious of a society we should force on Palestinians, and within the Hamas rank and file, you're gonna get a wide range of views on all three of those issues. You'll have the liberals and you'll have the conservatives on all three of those issues. Look, the reality is today, what is Hamas?[01:25:00]
Zachary Foster: It's a shadow of its former self, its leadership is despised, you could say, by many Palestinians. it's operating underground. Its civil servants and its militants are just being gunned down, and they're being bombed on a daily basis. It can't operate in the open because otherwise Israeli fighter jets will drop bombs on these people and kill them during the ceasefire because that's what Israel's been doing during the ceasefire.
So the West [01:25:30] Bank, where are there Hamas militants in the West Bank? there are basically none. Israel has effectively completely destroyed armed resistance in the West Bank. it doesn't really exist anymore. it's gone. Israel's killed them all or imprisoned them all or exiled them all.
there's no militant resistance left in the West Bank, and in Gaza, They wanna give up their arms. They're just like, "Stop slaughtering us. Give us back Gaza and give us a pathway to a state, and we don't even wanna be in charge [01:26:00] anymore." Hamas is almost...
I mean, they're not irrelevant 'cause they're still in control of the 50% of Gaza that is bombed every day, and is being starved. but, like, They've been reduced to nothing. They have incredibly little power. They have so few arms. They have a lot of people that are willing to pick up arms and join them,
Ezra Lipp: Right
Zachary Foster: but that's because people will pick up arms and fight Israel because it's Israel, not because it's Hamas, right?
Ezra Lipp: Okay. one last question what do you think the thinking was [01:26:30] around the Al-Aqsa flood campaign October 7th? obviously there's a lot of misconceptions of what happened that day. we're not gonna get into all that now. there's theories that, things happened beyond Hamas' control that they maybe didn't plan on, such as they might not have been aware the Nova Festival was there, that it was mainly meant to be more of an military operation, and they didn't expect to, be unchallenged that long.
[01:27:00] So, there's a lot of fog of war still around that day, and a lot of great, documentary, you know, material debunking some of the common myths out there. We don't have to get into that. but just, strategically, Like, Hamas knows who they were dealing with.
they know that Israel responds tenfold or, infinity folds, as you said. what do you think the strategic, thinking was around staging, an attack on that scale?[01:27:30]
Zachary Foster: There's so much to say, but a few things I will say is first, it would be imprudent to underestimate the significance of one man, and that's Yahya Sinwar, right? Because he spent many years behind bars. He spent many years in an Israeli prison, and he was released in the Gilad Shalit deal in, was it 2011 or so?
And
Ezra Lipp: was a Israeli, soldier that was captured
Zachary Foster: Right. So Gilad Shalit is [01:28:00] kidnapped in what? 2004 or '5-ish or so, and he's sitting in Hamas custody until he's released, 2010, 2011, '12-ish. and the reason I'm mentioning this is because Yahya Sinwar was completely committed to releasing all Palestinian prisoners, these were his comrades.
These were his comrades in arms, and they were still behind bars, and he was free.
Ezra Lipp: Yeah.
Zachary Foster: living under occupation, but a free man within occupied Palestine.
Ezra Lipp: these Palestinian [01:28:30] prisoners they're not mostly convicted criminals. They're abducted individuals.
Zachary Foster: I mean, what does it even mean to be a convicted Palestinian criminal? That a military judge who's a Jewish supremacist, convicts you to a crime for which you're not even allowed to defend yourself because the evidence is secret, and the conviction rate's 99.7% in that court?
what does a Palestinian criminal even mean? every single Palestinian sitting in Israeli [01:29:00] prisoners, I don't care how many people they killed, their trials were unjust. They should all be released, every single one of them. None of them were, were given a free and fair trial. Zero of them. Zero. So, they were all imprisoned unjustly. they should all be released immediately.
Ezra Lipp: And including children.
Zachary Foster: there's women, there's children. By the way, all of whom were supposed to be released according to the October 2025 ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.
All the women and children were supposed to be released. They were not. but it's silly because then Israel will just go and [01:29:30] arrest the same people they just released,
Ezra Lipp: Yeah.
Zachary Foster: done that. that's why one of the fundamental flaws of believing you can release Palestinian prisoners by capturing Israelis is that once they're released, they'll just get recaptured.
They'll just get re-kidnapped. this is the problem. You're not getting at the real issue, which is the occupation. this was maybe a flaw Sinwar's thinking. You can get them released, but then they'll just get re-kidnapped because you haven't gotten at the root cause of the problem. But yeah, course, Sinwar, he was [01:30:00] obviously, a real believer in the cause and a real militant, and someone obviously willing to give their life for the cause, and obviously hell-bent on getting those Palestinian prisoners out of prison. So you can't underestimate, the desires and the wishes and the perseverance of one man, 'cause it really was him.
A-and then look, Hamas has published a document explaining Al-Aqsa flood. there's a 25-page PDF in Arabic floating around you could dig up, and they've explained why they... And it's all everything you already know, right? It's the threats Al-Aqsa, right?
Over the previous many years, Israel [01:30:30] had been threatening Al-Aqsa, right? Going back to 2021. it's the occupation, it's the Palestinian prisoners. it's all the things you already know about. the siege on Gaza, right? That you're besieging us
Ezra Lipp: and I understand all that and I mean, we just spoke at length about that stuff, but I guess just from a strategic perspective, what did Hamas, e-expect that it would accomplish? was it just like a last-ditch effort to wake up the world?
Or was it just about Hostages?
Zachary Foster: L- let's
[01:31:00] reimagine October 7th according to how Yahya Sinwar thought it would go. Like best case scenario, right?
Ezra Lipp: Yeah, sure
Zachary Foster: There's no Nova Music Festival, most of the people killed on October 7th were killed either at the Nova Music Festival or in the adjacent area. so that's like 400 civilians that didn't get killed, right?
Ezra Lipp: And it is unclear, because Israel hasn't allowed an investigation, but there definitely were people that crossed the militarized fence that day that [01:31:30] weren't affiliated with Hamas
that may or may not have been acting in their own accord.
Zachary Foster: they attacked six military bases, okay? They were going after capturing Israeli soldiers. They didn't want civilians. In the days after October 7th, you have, reports coming out of Israel in the Israeli press, people who are talking, through, intermediaries to Palestinians saying all for all, and this is purported by Ynet in mid-October, all for all.
Empty Israeli prisons of Palestinians, [01:32:00] you get all 250 hostages back You could have got every single one of them alive. and by the way, Hamas was trying to get rid of the civilians. They didn't want them. they're first of all just not as valuable. When Hamas captures an Israeli soldier, they can demand a prisoner who's been sentenced to life, who has five life sentences on their head. They can demand that Palestinian be released because they have an Israeli soldier, right? Like for like, soldiers for [01:32:30] soldiers. Hamas wanted soldiers. They didn't want civilians.
Now, there were commands to kill anyone you need to to take the soldiers, right? Like there were war, war crimes committed in the process, but they were clearly going after military bases. They were going after soldiers. They took over the Erez military base. They took over what is effectively a gigantic military compound, and they neutralized it and took control over it.
They took control over the Israeli military base in [01:33:00] Re'im, in Be'eri, all these Gaza Envelope border towns. There are military bases located in all of them, and they went after the bases in all of them this was a military operation in which lots of civilians were killed, obviously many of them by Israel, of course, and many of them by non-Hamas people that came into Israel.
So what was the goal? The goal was to come into Israel, capture however many soldiers as possible, come back. [01:33:30] Maybe you kill a few hundred people, most of them are Israeli military personnel. You come back into Gaza with your hostages, negotiate a hostage release, now you just freed 10,000 Palestinians.
that was the goal. In that world where you maybe kill only a few hundred people, and most of them are soldiers and you come back with a few hundred, Israeli prisoners of war, maybe things look differently. maybe if the death toll's dramatically lower and maybe if don't have the Nova music festival
maybe things look very [01:34:00] differently on October 8th and 9th. I mean, again, I'm just trying to imagine what the strategic thinking was. Like, what's the best case scenario that Sinwar says, "Okay, maybe they don't destroy 90% of Gaza and kill 100,000 people plus, and carry out a livestreamed genocide for 1,053 days.
Maybe there's a world where things turn out differently. Maybe Biden tells Israel to stop after three months, like every previous American president had, right? Like this is how the [01:34:30] wars go. Israel starts carpet bombing Gaza, and then at some point the US president says, "Stop." That happened in the 2008, 2009 war when Obama said, "Stop."
that happened in 2014, when Obama said stop again. It happened in the 2006 Hezbollah war as well, by the way. That was, I think George Bush said enough is enough. in 2021, Biden said enough is enough.
in May 2021, he said stop. Basically, every war is the same. Israel carpet bombs Gaza until the US says stop. [01:35:00] This time the US didn't say stop
Ezra Lipp: Zachary Foster, thank you so much. That was so informative. I think so many people are gonna find this incredibly illuminating.
I'd love to have you back sometime to explore another area. thank you so much for your time, and it was a pleasure speaking.
Zachary Foster: Sure thing, Ezra. Anytime. Thanks for having me
All right, and there you have it. Thank you, Zach, for coming on the [01:35:30] show. It was so great to have you. We would love to have you back. Please check out and support Palestine Nexus. It is an incredible resource. You could also, of course, support The Thin Veil by becoming a monthly subscriber on Patreon or leaving a one-time tip or donation on Ko-fi.
Leave a rating and review if you can't support financially. It really helps. This episode was edited by myself as well as the exceptionally helpful Ali Budner
The theme music is by [01:36:00] Magic and the Other, which is my band. It is a song called "The Thin Veil." This is the instrumental version. We will be back next week. Don't forget to send this episode to someone who does not see eye to eye with you on these subjects. I double dog dare you. All right. I wish you a very free Palestine.
Thank you so much for being here, and I will see you soon
[01:36:30]