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Interview
5 November 2023 2.00 h

LAURENT COHEN MEDINA

Co-President of the Catalan Association of Jews and Palestinians Together

“Israel is acting with total cruelty and impunity”

Cohen attributes the escalation of the current conflict in the Middle East to the constant violation of Palestinians’ rights by the Israeli authorities

“Gaza has become an open-air prison where more than one and a half million people live” “THIS CONFLICT REQUIRES INTERVENTION ON AN INTERNATIONAL SCALE”
Do you think that we have a clear enough view of what is hap­pen­ing in Is­rael and Pales­tine?
It may seem like there’s a lot of con­fu­sion, but in re­al­ity things are very clear. If there is con­fu­sion, it’s be­cause there’s no good as­sess­ment of the real sit­u­a­tion: we are talk­ing about a 70-year-old mil­i­tary oc­cu­pa­tion of a ter­ri­tory. There’s been con­tin­u­ous coloni­sa­tion by Is­rael and a sit­u­a­tion of apartheid against the Pales­tini­ans who live in Is­raeli ter­ri­tory and who make up 20% of the pop­u­la­tion. Prac­ti­cally every day, armed set­tlers, with the help of the state, are dri­ving Pales­tini­ans from their lands. It is re­ally eth­nic cleans­ing that has been going on for seven decades. And all of this ob­vi­ously causes a re­ac­tion from the Pales­tin­ian re­sis­tance groups with ac­tions like the at­tack car­ried out by Hamas. It must also be re­mem­bered that Gaza is under an il­le­gal block­ade sim­ply be­cause it has a gov­ern­ment that the West doesn’t like. Gaza has be­come an open-air prison where more than one and a half mil­lion peo­ple live, in an area sim­i­lar in size to that of Barcelona’s met­ro­pol­i­tan area.
Given Is­rael’s mil­i­tary su­pe­ri­or­ity, what was the point of the Hamas at­tack?
They want to mo­bilise pub­lic opin­ion against what’s hap­pen­ing, es­pe­cially in the Arab world, and given the re­cent ef­forts to reach an agree­ment to nor­malise re­la­tions be­tween Is­rael and Saudi Ara­bia. It was a des­per­ate at­tempt to show that Pales­tine will not sur­ren­der and will con­tinue to call for the re­turn of its land and free­doms. The at­tack was also to show that Hamas has grown in strength. It was not im­pro­vised or spon­ta­neous, it re­quired a lot of prepa­ra­tion and co­or­di­na­tion to get past an in­tel­li­gence ser­vice as strong as Is­rael’s. Now we’re wit­ness­ing the ter­ri­ble reprisals from that. Com­pletely iso­lat­ing Gaza means the peo­ple, above all the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion, could starve, while we can be al­most cer­tain that a land in­va­sion will fol­low.
How does Hamas at­tack­ing civil­ians and help the Pales­tin­ian cause?
The bot­tom line is that the Is­raeli au­thor­i­ties kill civil­ians just about every day, but we don’t find out about it. There’s a very clear bias in the West­ern media and Is­rael is por­tray­ing it­self as a vic­tim now more than ever. Be­fore the Hamas at­tack, this year some 200 Pales­tini­ans had al­ready been killed by Is­raeli at­tacks, 40 of which were chil­dren. And that is apart from such in­hu­mane mea­sures as not al­low­ing can­cer pa­tients in Gaza to re­ceive treat­ment in Is­raeli hos­pi­tals, for ex­am­ple. News about the suf­fer­ing of the Pales­tin­ian pop­u­la­tion does not get cov­er­age. Hamas took hostages to try to pre­vent re­tal­i­a­tion and to ne­go­ti­ate a pris­oner ex­change, which is an­other se­ri­ous issue. There are about 5,000 Pales­tin­ian po­lit­i­cal pris­on­ers in Is­raeli pris­ons. Of these, some 1,500 are im­pris­oned with­out any for­mal ac­cu­sa­tion of wrong­do­ing.
Could the Hamas at­tack spur Is­lam­o­pho­bia in Eu­rope?
There’s an un­der­ly­ing Is­lam­o­pho­bia in Eu­rope that Is­rael knows how to use. Is­rael ar­gues that it’s pro­tect­ing the West from Is­lamic fun­da­men­tal­ism. Hamas is a branch of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, the same or­gan­i­sa­tion that gov­erns Turkey. But Turkey is a mem­ber of NATO and was on the verge of join­ing the Eu­ro­pean Union. Since Turkey is an ally of the West, no one says any­thing about who gov­erns it. Is­lamism is used as a weapon to ac­cuse cer­tain peo­ple of being ex­trem­ist, and it’s mag­ni­fied by the West­ern media. There’s a lot of mis­in­for­ma­tion.
How can we help from Cat­alo­nia?
At first the EU wanted to cut aid to Pales­tine in re­tal­i­a­tion for the Hamas at­tack, but Josep Bor­rell [the High Rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Eu­ro­pean Union for For­eign Af­fairs and Se­cu­rity Pol­icy] backed down. The Coalició Prou Com­plic­i­tat amb Is­rael [a coali­tion of pro-Pales­tin­ian groups in Cat­alo­nia] de­mands that the EU – in­clud­ing the Span­ish gov­ern­ment, ob­vi­ously – stop giv­ing un­con­di­tional sup­port to Is­rael. Peo­ple should lobby against the im­punity with which Is­rael acts with­out any crit­i­cism from West­ern democ­ra­cies. It’s also nec­es­sary to call on the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment to sus­pend the co­op­er­a­tion agree­ments it has with Is­rael as long as the human and po­lit­i­cal rights of the Pales­tin­ian pop­u­la­tion are not re­spected. Is­rael must pay a po­lit­i­cal price for its ac­tions. The prob­lem is that the West is un­con­di­tion­ally on the side of the state of Is­rael.
Is Is­raeli so­ci­ety di­vided on the Pales­tin­ian issue?
As the Cata­lan As­so­ci­a­tion of Jews and Pales­tini­ans, we know that, un­for­tu­nately, there is an in­ter­nal di­vi­sion be­tween the re­li­gious com­po­nent that rep­re­sents the set­tlers and Is­rael’s cur­rent gov­ern­ment and the sec­u­lar part of so­ci­ety, which is against the Ne­tanyahu gov­ern­ment’s wish to limit the pow­ers of the Supreme Court, which is the guar­an­tor of Is­raeli democ­racy. The prob­lem is that Is­rael is only a democ­racy for Jew­ish cit­i­zens, the rest are not in­cluded. Within the bor­ders of Is­rael live the orig­i­nal peo­ple of Pales­tine, who make up 20% of the pop­u­la­tion. A democ­racy in which 20% of the pop­u­la­tion is not rep­re­sented and does not have the same rights is not a real democ­racy. This was made very clear in a fun­da­men­tal law of 2018 in which the right to self-de­ter­mi­na­tion is recog­nised ex­clu­sively for the Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion. The re­al­ity is ig­nored, which is that there’s a Pales­tin­ian pop­u­la­tion of eight mil­lion peo­ple that will not just cease to exist.
What is life like for the Pales­tini­ans who live within Is­rael?
To begin with, there are dif­fer­ences be­tween the sta­tus of peo­ple who live in Jerusalem and those who live in the rest of the coun­try. In Is­rael, for ex­am­ple, let’s imag­ine there’s a fam­ily that needs to ex­tend their house be­cause they have more chil­dren. Al­though this is a so­ci­ety in which the fam­ily is the basis of every­thing, if they ask for per­mis­sion to carry out the work from the rel­e­vant local au­thor­ity they will be re­fused, sim­ply be­cause they are Arabs. If they then go ahead and ex­tend the house any­way, with­out per­mis­sion, and they are found out, the house will be knocked down. It’s as bru­tal as that. If you’re Pales­tin­ian you can’t live in cer­tain neigh­bour­hoods ei­ther. It’s not writ­ten any­where in law, but an Arab cou­ple would not be al­lowed to go and live in a Jew­ish neigh­bour­hood. The pop­u­la­tion is not al­lowed to mix. It’s the same with pub­lic func­tions, such as mil­i­tary ser­vice.
In what sense?
Until 2018, the Druze – who are a mi­nor­ity with Mus­lim roots in Is­rael – did com­pul­sory mil­i­tary ser­vice [Is­raeli Arabs have never done it]. But a law pushed through by the Ne­tanyahu gov­ern­ment that year tight­ened the apartheid con­di­tions and they were banned from doing mil­i­tary ser­vice. Now only Jew­ish peo­ple have all their rights recog­nised and guar­an­teed. The rest of the pop­u­la­tion are treated as sec­ond-class cit­i­zens. They can vote but are not rep­re­sented; Is­rael is not a real democ­racy. Apartheid also ap­plies to the oc­cu­pied ter­ri­to­ries.
How is it pos­si­ble that a con­flict that gets so much at­ten­tion is so far from being re­solved?
This con­flict re­quires the in­ter­ven­tion of an out­side power, on an in­ter­na­tional scale. The bal­ance of power at the mo­ment means that for the United States and NATO, Is­rael is their main ally in the re­gion. This is the root of the prob­lem. We’ve al­ready seen that the much dis­cussed two-state so­lu­tion can­not be a so­lu­tion at all if we take into ac­count that there are al­ready 750,000 set­tlers liv­ing in the oc­cu­pied Pales­tin­ian ter­ri­to­ries. As long as there are no in­ter­na­tional pow­ers to de­fend the rights of the Pales­tin­ian pop­u­la­tion, it is very dif­fi­cult to bring the con­flict to an end, be­cause no one will stand up to Is­rael. The sit­u­a­tion is that Is­rael has been grad­u­ally erod­ing the rights and ab­sorb­ing the ter­ri­tory of the Pales­tini­ans. This makes the im­me­di­ate fu­ture very bleak, es­pe­cially for the Pales­tin­ian pop­u­la­tion, who will no doubt con­tinue to suf­fer very harsh reprisals on be­half of the Is­raeli au­thor­i­ties. Global geopol­i­tics would have to be com­pletely re­bal­anced for there to be any real hope of a fair and just so­lu­tion.

in­ter­view in­ter­na­tional

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