The original upload is still available above, however YT afterwards imposed viewer restrictions and so Double Down News has re-uploaded its own more sanitised version in which the worst and most graphic images have been blotted out. This uncensored version is embedded below:
Their subsequent upload – the one embedded directly above – has once again been restricted and so on Tuesday 17th, Double Down News applied further censorship to the images shown and have produced this third version below:
David Hearst is editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He was chief foreign leader writer of the Guardian, former Associate Foreign Editor, European Editor, Moscow Bureau Chief, European Correspondent, and Ireland Correspondent. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.
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I have provided a full transcript below with links included.
If anyone is guilty for the bloodshed that’s going on it is the international community, particularly Britain. The international community has given the greenest of green lights to the Israeli Army to do what it wants and that means the freedom to commit war crimes,
You’ll see Western values as they actually operate: raining down bombs on completely innocent Gazan civilians. Whether they’re supporters of Hamas or Fateh; whether they’re civilians; they’re going to die and are dying in their thousands. Where are Western values there?
If there’s blood on anyone’s hands, it’s on those who say Israel has a right to defend itself…
[cut to Joe Biden, UK Secretary of State for Defence Grant Shapps, former UK Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, opposition Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, shadow Attorney General for England and Wales, Emily Thornberry, and shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy.]
This is not the whole story. It’s not the defence of Israel, it is the expansion of Israel and it is the creation of an apartheid regime even more severe than the one that happened in South Africa.
Israel says it’s fighting an existential war and it has compared what Hamas did to a holocaust. Half my family died in the Holocaust. There’s no comparison.
From a Palestinian perspective, you have to realise that Israel was the lords, the masters of the land. They controlled all your movements. They controlled how much you ate. They controlled who you married. It’s the one that decides when to attack.
This is a country used to total control over one half of the population and lost that control –and it lost that control wildly.
I’m appalled by some of the things that happened. Desperation turned into savagery and I will use that word about what happened at Kfar Aza [kibbutz], or the music festival that took place where unarmed festival goers were shot like ducks.
These scenes are unknown to the current generation of Israelis and the shock this has produced; the sudden loss of confidence in its star performer, which is his army and its intelligence services cannot be underestimated.
That shock has now turned to anger. That anger has now turned to an unholy desire to kill Gazans…
There’s a Kfar Aza happening every night in Gaza. Women and children buried under rubble. There is absolutely apocalyptic scenes going on there. The Israeli Air Force deliberately targeting blocks, individual families, and wiping them out with precision weapons. And this is happening now to one family after another.
I don’t think Israel, and in particular the Israeli Army, can give people lectures on brutality, particularly directed at children. It happens all the time in the so-called stable peace. There were 34 children killed so far this year by soldiers in the West Bank. So there is butchery and there’s barbarity on both sides.
The problem is what’s taking place in Gaza, which is truly apocalyptic, is done on an industrial scale, and by the time this comes out the death toll will mount and mount.
Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defence minister – the man who said that Palestinians are “human animals” – said Israeli forces will not be held accountable for anything they do. So all the past rules have been torn up and Israel is going for the maximum number of Gazan casualties, and that’s what the international community is allowing Israel to do. They have given Netanyahu the green light and an unlimited time to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.
Gazans have tried to break out of their open-air prison before. It happened on the day in which Donald Trump’s son-in-law [Jared Kushner] was signing the ceremony that transferred the official American Embassy to Jerusalem. On that very day, you had Palestinians unarmed who were gunned down demonstrating right next to the fence. They didn’t break out of the fence, they were simply being shot at, rather like ducks with the most sophisticated weapons.
When that demonstration happened, Gazans learned a lesson, that the next breakout that they do would have to be armed.
Hamas is not ISIS
Hamas is very very different from ISIS and actually the two were at war with each other in which there were quite a few dead bodies.
There’s no analytical comparison between Hamas and ISIS and the main difference between them is that although Hamas is an Islamist organisation and offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas is a resistance group dedicated to ending the occupation. And this still is a dispute and a conflict over land and not religion.
Having said that, Hamas called its attack on Southern Israel the Al-Aqsa Flood for a reason. Al-Aqsa is being invaded and attacked all the time. Al-Aqsa isn’t just the third holiest site for Islam, it’s also a national symbol for Palestine. This sacred turf is actually being taken away piecemeal and again the West is letting them do this. This was the reason for Hamas saying enough is enough.
But there were lots of other reasons as well. If you can imagine it: 16 years in an open-air prison with the electricity controlled or rationed, food rationed, 60 percent unemployment, settler attacks on Palestinian Villages, protected by the army which Israelis themselves describe as “pogroms”.
[This led to] the total impossibility of a political solution, or even a national unity government, and that suited Israel absolutely fine.
When they were demonstrating about democracy in Israel, no one was talking about the obvious elephant in the room which was an apartheid regime for half of the population; the Palestinian population. Neither left nor right were bothered about it. And that too is an ingredient into what actually happened here, because the message that was being given by Israel to the Palestinians is ‘you don’t matter, we can do it without you, we can control you, and we’ve forgotten about the Palestinian State. No one is interested in it.’
Just days before this attack happened was the imminence of a normalisation deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and Netanyahu got up in the United Nations General Assembly waving a map that eradicated Palestine completely and saying:
“We’ll build a new corridor of peace and prosperity that connects Asia through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel to Europe. This is an extraordinary change. A monumental change.” [from 6:30 mins]
Reversing the logic of the last possibility of an agreement on a two-state solution which was in 2002, which was called the Arab peace initiative.
You’ve got Israel that’s turning the screw all the time and encroaching. There are now 700,000 settlers. It’s impossible to put Palestinian State and everyone knows it. But a two-state solution is cynically a policy of all European governments and America. It’s a policy that can’t now possibly exist, and that is the situation that the Palestinians are facing.
Now what Hamas attack has done is to say ‘I’m sorry, we’re here, you cannot ignore us.’ Now, they’ve done it in a brutal way. They have definitely committed crimes against humanity, but the Palestinians who would not necessarily support Hamas at all would say ‘what the hell else do we do?’ And that’s what’s happening all over the place to a new generation of Palestinians, and this is the fundamental problem of Israel thinking; that it can wipe Gaza out.
It can wipe Gaza out. It can kill 10,000 people, 20,000 people. It cannot kill the Palestinian cause.
Hamas is a complicated organisation to describe. It has various wings. There is a faction of Hamas that controls Gaza and there is Mohammed Deif the head of the al-Qassam Brigades named after a Syrian preacher Izz ad-Din al-Qassam who turned to resistance under the British mandate. He was killed by the British in a forest outside Jenin. What the West and Israel permanently misunderstands about the nature of Palestinian resistance was that his name and example lived on.
If Israel now succeeds in eradicating the military leadership the al-Qassam Brigades of Gaza and kills them all, what do you think is going to happen to the memory that they leave behind? Yes, they can level Gaza. They can reduce the whole thing to a pile of rubble. They can kill 100,000 people and they can say ‘job done’. And they can even defeat Hezbollah. But what do you think is going to happen to the memory of all those dead?
In a new generation that will break out with even stronger force in 20 or 30 years time. That’s history. That’s what’s happened before.
Resistance, armed resistance, has been crushed many times. It was crushed in 1948. It was crushed in 1969. It was crushed in 1973. It’s been crushed regularly, and what has happened? Hamas is now much, much stronger than previous iterations of it. So there’s always going to be, whoever you call them, a very strong element of Palestinians who say the only way of changing the situation is by armed resistance until they are involved in proper negotiations and a peace deal, and a calm, and an exchange of prisoners.
But if Israel thinks that they can wipe out Hamas and wipe out the Palestinian resistance, history tells us they are completely wrong. And all we are doing now is setting the seeds for and even more powerful round of resistance in one or two decades to come.
How do we stop the violence? We stop the violence by reversing course. By realising that the Palestinians are people; that there’s always going to be resistance whether it’s Hamas, whether it’s anyone else: whatever they call themselves, they are not going to be chucked off their land. There is not going to be another Nakba. They’re going to stay there whatever, and they’re going to die on that land.
The only way out of this incredible cul-de-sac that we’ve got ourselves into, is to stop giving Israel the green light. Is to enforce negotiations with a broadly representative Palestinian national unity government that allows Palestinians to elect their own leaders, that lifts the siege on Gaza, and lifts the siege on all the other Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank, and that you start a process of sharing the land ‘from the river to the sea’ between the two peoples.
And this has got to be done with a realisation in Israel that there is no end to this until they fundamentally reverse course.
The alternative media in a crisis like this is really important because it provides a different voice to the voice that you’re getting on the BBC, on the ITN, on Sky, that is showing a one-sided horror at what’s going on with Hamas and a blanket support for Israel without really troubling themselves with what’s going on to Palestinian civilians.
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wall of controversy 