Mónica G. Prieto: If Mandela Were Palestinian Today, He Would Have Been Assassinated

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—How does a whole generation of children come to want to die?

—Well, when they have no hope for the future, when an entire universe has been created to deprive them of any hope of surviving. When life is more difficult than death, children want to die. I have never seen this in thirty years, thirty-five years of covering conflict, never. Because there is a matter we discuss in the book and that you know perfectly well. In wars, children are protected. Children are always kept away from the front lines. It may happen as in Ukraine, in the Mariupol theater, where civilians crowded with children are bombed at a civilian core. But this is exceptional in wars. In the case of Gaza there is a systematic policy by the Israeli government to annihilate generations of Gazans. And that involves from infancy to the elderly, meaning it covers everything. They bombed the Gaza fertility center with three thousand or four thousand embryos already fertilized. That is what marks you, too, one of the crimes of genocide, the fact of preventing future generations from developing, from growing or giving birth to future generations of children. And in Gaza’s case, it is complete: if you kill entire families. A new acronym has been created, “Child Without a Surviving Family,” that is, a wounded child without a surviving family. The fact that such things happen, of course, condemns children to absolute despair. They have nothing to live for, no family left with whom to live, no schools to go to. The childhood of Gaza’s children has become a search for drinking water to survive, or for food, or for doing absurd tasks, such as collecting stones to make tombstones, because there are no other jobs in Gaza, because they must survive. Truly, they have had any hope of life stripped away.

—Why does Israel insist on calling this a “war”? Do they have a point or not?

—It is not a war because there is a context of belligerent occupation. And international law dictates it. The legal framework tells you there are different situations. In the case that a power invades another country, it is not a war; there is a “situation of belligerent occupation.” And in that situation the United Nations grants the occupied, the invaded, the right to legitimate resistance. “Legitimate resistance,” obviously, does not imply that Hamas can kill civilians. Obviously, the attacks of October seventh constituted war crimes that should have been examined by international tribunals and that cannot be examined because Israel executed the perpetrators of those attacks summarily, instead of detaining them and bringing them to international authorities.

—Why do Western media embrace the Israeli narrative?

—Because Israel, since the creation of the State in 1948, has been building an alternative narrative in which it reframes words, whitewashes language, and whitewashes its actions. All of its war crimes have become Israel’s obligation. Israel believes itself morally superior, Israel believes it is the chosen people with a right to a country that is not theirs. I mean, Israel considers this self-defense, when you cannot talk of self-defense in a context of occupation. If you are occupying, you are not defending yourself; you are aggressing the occupied, so it is the occupied who can defend themselves. But in the case of international media, I think one commits a crime. And this I’ve discussed with Palestinian and international jurists, and they all consider that essentially there is collusion with genocide in not condemning the war crimes committed inside Gaza. When you have protected or doubted, you have given space to the lies that spread in Israel in a massive way, such as the burned children in ovens. It did not exist, but it was a very recurrent image in the collective imagination that linked Palestinians to the Nazis, which is an old Israeli strategy. “All my enemies are Nazis, I am defending myself from Nazism. And see what happened to us in the Holocaust, you must protect us.” This is the game Israel has played throughout its existence. I myself fell into that game. I was a correspondent for three years in Israel, in Jerusalem, in occupied Jerusalem. On the other hand, I lived in East Jerusalem. Today everything is absorbed by Israel. And of course, I myself feared calling things by their names, because I didn’t want to fall into antisemitism. I thought that something inside me could be antisemitic. It’s the last thing I want, to be antisemitic. But here it isn’t about antisemitism; it’s about anti-Zionism. Indeed, Zionism has revealed itself as a supremacist, expansionist ideology. It is a colonial settlement project at the expense of another people, looting another people. And indeed, Zionism has become a form of fascism. They talk about the only democracy in the Middle East, but it only has rights for Jews. Arab Israelis cannot participate in elections at the same level as the rest of the Jews, so we cannot speak of a democracy. We can speak of an ethnocracy, at best. Then, all these things really require a mental process to understand all these nuances, to be able to speak objectively about the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is a conflict, as I said, of expansionist colonial settlement, a colonial project. But of course, all this implies an effort by the international media that is not made. It is much easier to avoid accusations of antisemitism and amplify Israel’s lies, when Israel lies systematically since the creation of its state. A state, by the way, created after terrorist attacks by Zionist militias, armed Zionist groups that carried out attacks across the map, against hotels, against markets. They killed the Spanish honorary consul, they killed the head of the British Mandate in Palestine. That is, a series of attacks that in any other context would be labeled terrorism. For them, it was a national liberation project. A country that was not theirs.

—What level of organization do you need to kill an entire population by hunger and thirst?

—That is precisely the project of the book: to try to put things in perspective, to connect the dots that have reached us in the form of a flood of gore, a deluge of images that prevented us from thinking, from seeing beyond, because we did not want to see them, they horrified us so much that we looked away. There is a project behind all this, and it not only involves killing the population but turning the territory into a place, a barren wasteland, uninhabitable, contaminated, where nothing can be cultivated, where nothing can be fished, where nothing can produce food, where nothing can produce life. They have destroyed the entire health infrastructure. That is one of the great mandates of international law, the laws of war. You cannot attack civil infrastructure, you cannot attack bridges or roads. Imagine: now all the hospitals in the Strip have been besieged, surrounded, bombed and finally assaulted militarily. And Israeli soldiers have wrecked priceless, costly medical machinery, by blows to the head. We are talking about all the universities being attacked in the first month of the assault, all the museums, all public libraries, national archives, seized in the first weeks of the genocide. And we are talking about intentionality. For genocide to occur, there must be the intention to commit it, and that is the key to the crime of genocide. That intention can be inferred from words and actions. In this case, both coincide. Israeli leaders have stated openly that they will annihilate a subhuman population. And they have created a pattern that prevents life in Palestine, that prevents life in Gaza. Not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, but still, this has been done in a very meticulous way.

—Hunger.

—We must understand that Gaza was already twenty years under a food siege since the 2005 elections. In 2006 a food siege was imposed, so calories were already being counted. Israel conducts a study of how many calories it should allow in Gaza so that people do not die of starvation, but still go hungry. For twenty years people have endured hunger. Hunger combined with three or four brutal military offensives, with hundreds or thousands dead. The march against the occupation that occurred at the border, where eleven hundred people died. That entire sequence left the population of Gaza terribly weakened, making genocide easier. And you also have to understand what Gaza is. Gaza is a very small coastal strip, controlled by land, sea and air by Israel. If they want to shut the door to food, and they do, they starve the population, which is quite easy. The speed with which everything has developed implies a machinery behind it that was built and thought out.

—Would there have been another response to that terrible October seventh if another government had existed besides Netanyahu’s?

—I’m afraid the situation would have continued more or less the same. Clearly, this is the most radical, messianic and supremacist government in Israel’s history, because it has allied itself with supremacist, messianic colonists who believe in the superiority of the Jewish race. Literally, they believe they are superior, that this is the promised land, that they possess moral superiority and that they can kill the population. Honestly, I think the problem lies in Israeli society. Israeli society has been raised in a Zionist ideology that has produced a huge brainwashing, a massive brainwashing, where the population is victimized for having survived the Shoah, with all the justification. It is a people who survived a Holocaust, and that overwhelms me, and it is one of the main reasons why, while in Israel, you hold back from voicing certain reasons, because they have survived the Holocaust. What can you tell them? But that has been exploited by the government, by governments and especially by the country’s Zionist ideology, to justify crimes. These are not the first crimes that occur in Palestine. War crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed since the creation of the State of Israel. As I said, this is the first time we can see them, place them in perspective, and understand that there is evil behind it, with fascism, totalitarianism, and supremacism behind it. But as I say, I fear the problem is Zionism. And I fear that eighty percent of Israeli society, according to surveys, supports the mass expulsion of Palestinians in Gaza. And they don’t care whether it is through death or forced displacement. Both are crimes, international crimes. But they certainly want to do it. That has convinced them that coexistence is impossible. On the other hand, I don’t find that discourse on the other side. For them, coexistence is not impossible. And the problem is not the Jew; the problem is the occupation. And that is what all Palestinians tell us. We don’t care if they are Jewish, or Buddhist, or Christian. The problem is the occupation. We need our lands back, or part of our lands. So I fear that no, that Zionist discourse that dominates Israeli society—so that there is a just solution today for both sides—is not there.

—The brutality against hospitals and the brutality against journalists. Why?

—First, because they can. This is like asking why brutalize medical infrastructure. Because they knew it would come out free. And this is a comment often made to me by Judeo-Israeli analysts who are against all of this. Understand that many Jews, Israelis in particular, and Jews who are deeply opposed to all of this, not so much inside Israel as abroad, tell you because they can, they want to change the narrative, they want to seize control of the narrative. There were two fundamental pillars to completely control Gaza’s narrative. Prevent entry of foreign journalists, which has been happening since 2008. In fact, I in 2008, after my last trip to Gaza, tried to enter by boat, one of the humanitarian flotillas, because they were causing a considerable massacre of civilians. Not only were we refused at sea, as usual, but I was put on a list of non gratas and barred from entering for ten years for trying to go into Gaza, for trying to do my job. We are denied entry to Gaza and to see it with our own eyes. On the other hand, the local narrator—prepared by Western or well-formed Arab press—was killed. All NGOs are present in Palestine. All journalists have covered Palestine to exhaustion, because the injustice was brutal. And it was easy: you could arrive, get accredited, cross the border and enter. And everyone spoke to you. I interviewed Hamas prime ministers, ministers of Islamic Jihad, military leaders… It was very easy. They wanted to deliver their message. Israel has completely destroyed this. How? By preventing entry on one side, and on the other by killing the local narrator, who is trained to international standards and who is doing their job. They did it in several ways, not only by directly killing them but also by killing their families. There have been many attacks against families of reporters, many threats, obviously. Threats of all kinds and, routinely, they are carried out. And then with campaigns known as smear campaigns, campaigns of discrediting, i.e., accusing you of being from Hamas. This has happened to all Palestinian reporters. All Palestinians belong to Hamas. All. It doesn’t matter what they do, whether they are a doctor or a journalist. All depend on Hamas, all work for Hamas. The evidence is never shown. I remember when Anas Al-Sharif of Al Jazeera was killed, very young, who was an icon in the Strip, because he was one of the few who stayed in the city of Gaza. He had been accused several times of being from Hamas. There was never any evidence proving such, anyway. In any case, I recall headlines in the German press that read: “A Palestinian journalist dies, the death of a Hamas member, or a top Hamas official,” etc. The press does not do due diligence. And that’s why I say that the failure to do that work of verification makes us accomplices to genocide. The fact that we have given space to all of Israel’s crazy theories, to all of Israel’s crazy lies, according to which journalists are all from Hamas, that the children are incinerated in ovens, all those lies on which the narrative has been built, has been a necessary collaboration of the Western press with genocide.

—When will Israel’s expansionist ambition stop?

—That is one of the great problems, as we said before. The current government in Israel is a messianic and supremacist government from the perspective of the Torah, of the Hebrew Bible, or one of the three books of the Hebrew Bible. The project of Israel, the borders of Israel, that land promised by Yahweh, does not correspond to Palestine’s borders; it extends far beyond. This project is known in Israel as the “Greater Israel” or the “Expanded Israel.” And this project occupies part of southern Lebanon, almost all of Lebanon, occupies Syria, occupies Lebanon, occupies Iraq, occupies Egypt, occupies Jordan and reaches into Saudi Arabia. For now we have a context of military occupation in Palestine, in Syria and in Lebanon, which tells us this will not stop here. In talking with Hebrew-speaking Israeli philologists, I asked about maps, education, how Israeli children are taught geography, what Israel’s boundaries are, and they confirm it: Greater Israel has been imposed.

—Can Western societies today be described as collaborators with Israel?

—Yes, without a doubt. It would have been very easy at the beginning simply not to supply military hardware, because the United States and Germany provided a huge portion of the bombs that have been dropped on Gaza. And without their help, it would have been impossible. And without the protection of the rest, it would have been impossible. It was very difficult, returning to the start of our conversation, to be brave enough to rid ourselves of the myths that Israel sells us and all this sense of antisemitism, all this guilt we carry in our heads, to the point of crossing the red line of genocide. There was a very good line from José Luis Sampedro: “Israel is a rentier country of the Holocaust.” It cannot keep living off those rents eighty or ninety years later, while carrying out another genocide. It took some small countries, or not so small ones like Spain, Norway, Belgium, Colombia in its day, to take the step for the rest to follow. If this had happened earlier, there would not have been a siege, a famine in Gaza; the population would not have been weakened. Before this crisis, Gaza needed about a thousand trucks a day for its people to survive. After this crisis, only two hundred or zero, many seasons zero. Trucks did not enter. And those trucks, all that cargo, all that medicine, all those crutches, wheelchairs, were on the other side of the border. Israel allowed the entry of settlers to wreck the humanitarian cargo, to trample it, to tear it apart. It has allowed a malice, a brutality that I think degrades us all.

—What do you think of the boycott that recently targeted Madrid’s Festival of Ideas with a sponsor’s brand and writer Ariana Harwicz in Granada?

—It also happened in South Africa. It has nothing to do with cancellation. I think it is the only option now. We live in a world where citizens move in one direction and the political class goes in another. The citizens, in many countries like Spain, Norway or Belgium, clearly know that this is unacceptable because we are talking about humanity, part of humanity. The Palestinians do not want to be wiped out; we are part of humanity too. To protect humanity, we must take action. If politicians do not want to, if governments do not want to, we can act individually. For me, economic boycotts, divestment from Israeli companies, and cutting ties are today’s obligation, unless the institution itself voices opposition to genocide. Cooperating with Israeli institutions that have spoken out against genocide seems to me an obligation for all of us. This is not about punishing Israel; it is about punishing Zionism that protects genocide, of punishing genocide. And we must be very proactive. Indeed, South Africa fell in this way, through economic divestment. If they start receiving less income, they will reconsider.

—Are you afraid of repercussions from Israel?

—I don’t care. I’ve reached a point where I simply don’t care. What matters is that the Palestinians stop being killed. From a personal standpoint, this situation is intolerable. Honestly, I’m tired of seeing Palestinians die. I don’t think they’re trying to publish a book. I think they’ve lost certain battles, and Spain has lost a lot socially, morally. They know they won’t convince us, because they themselves are not convinced of what they’re doing. There’s a wonderful question I asked an Israeli academic recently, and we arrived at a conclusion after a beautiful conversation. I said, “But why this brutality? Why this need to finish off the last Palestinian?” We concluded that because the existence of even a single Palestinian reminds them that they stole the country.

—I don’t know if there is room for optimism. Do you see a future for Gaza and the Palestinians?

—One where they stop killing systematically. The truth is I see the Palestinians much more optimistic than I am, in the sense that a global consciousness has emerged in the world, one they did not count on. They had given up, they believed their cause lost, because they have long been denouncing. A lot has to change in the Israeli government, and I don’t just mean Netanyahu, but in Israeli society, in the entire political class. We’ll soon have elections in Israel. In the electoral programs of none of the parties is Palestine included. Palestine is written off; eliminate Palestine. As a possible future, first, many Palestinians and increasingly more Israeli Jews who oppose genocide propose: one state for all, with equal rights for all, which would be ideal. And a Palestinian friend told me: “If you’re going to call it Israel, call it Israel, but give us rights, give us the chance to have a normal life, to take care of our sheep, not have them stolen from us, not be violated.”

—Are there Palestinian leaders left? If Mandela were Palestinian, would he have been assassinated?

—Yes, if Mandela were Palestinian today he would have been assassinated. Anyone who could represent hope and guidance and a social reference has been killed. And it has not happened by accident. That’s what scholars tell you very well. Lists of intellectuals to be struck down have been designed and written. One of Gaza University’s deans told me that in the list he handled, two hundred names, they were all professors who had been deans, vice-deans, rectors, vice-rectors… The destruction of any intellectual reference for Gaza society has been carried out with meticulous care. And this also happens in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, with mass detention, with assassination. So, indeed, for Gaza, the possibility of a Mandela has been dismantled.