The Killing of Gaza’s Children

Dr. feroze sidhwa is a trauma and critical care surgeon who has worked extensively in international settings and is familiar with disaster and war zones. But he was unprepared for what he encountered when he went to the Gaza Strip earlier this year with a group of medical professionals. He and his colleague Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic and hand surgeon, published an article in Politico about what their medical team experienced in Gaza: “We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.” Sidhwa also published an op-ed in The New York Times detailing what he and 65 other healthcare workers saw in Gaza: multiple children and infants shot in the head and chest. And Sidhwa was also one of 99 healthcare workers who sent a letter to President Biden about the “massive human toll” they saw in Gaza over a combined period of 254 weeks of work there.

Today Sidhwa joins to explain why he and other healthcare workers have been so vocal in speaking out about what they saw and why Americans need to be concerned about what our government is helping Israel do in Gaza.

Nathan J. Robinson 

I want to just read a little bit from your latest Gaza letter, which was co-signed by 99 American physicians and nurses and addressed to the Biden-Harris administration.

We are 99 American physicians and nurses who have witnessed crimes beyond comprehension, crimes that we cannot believe you wish to continue supporting. Please meet with us to discuss what we saw and why we feel American policy in the Middle East must change immediately. President Biden, Vice President Harris, we wish you could see the nightmares that plague so many of us since we’ve returned. Dreams of children maimed and mutilated by our weapons. They’re inconsolable mothers begging us to save them. We wish you could hear the cries and screams our consciences will not let us forget. We cannot fathom why you continue arming the country that’s deliberately killing these children en masse.

You asked the Biden administration in that letter to meet with you. I want to first ask, have you received any response from the Biden-Harris administration?

Feroze Sidhwa 

No, I actually get all sorts of people forwarding me the automated emails that they get when they email the Biden administration asking them to meet with us. They forward the automated email to me and say, I can’t believe it’s just an automated email. And I say, well, that’s more than I’ve gotten, actually. So, no, I literally have not received so much as an acknowledgement of the letter from either Biden or Harris or anybody associated with them.

Robinson 

This is not the first letter, either, that you have sent to the Biden-Harris administration. Since you came back from Gaza, you’ve been working to draw attention to what you call in the letter “crimes beyond comprehension.” Perhaps you could tell us a little more about those crimes beyond comprehension that you and these dozens and dozens of other healthcare workers have witnessed in Gaza.

Sidhwa 

Sure. I, and a good number of other people who signed that letter, have worked in other combat zones, war zones, and humanitarian disaster zones. I’ve worked in southern Zimbabwe, Haiti, Burkina Faso, and in Ukraine three times during the Russian invasion. And Gaza is altogether unique. I’ve never really seen anything like it, and in many different ways.

The first is just the sheer scale of killing relative to the size of the place. It’s completely unprecedented. The U.N. report noted that you’d have to go back to the Rwandan genocide of 1994 to find a time when a population was obliterated at this fast of a rate, as long as you adjust by the size of the population—in other words, what percentage of the population was killed at what rate. And that’s only going by the official numbers. Incidentally, the numbers from the Gaza Ministry of Health don’t include deaths such as from starvation, infections, displacement—things like that.

So specifically, what we witnessed were a few things. Personally, I was at European hospital, and every day that we were there, we had huge mass casualty events. It’s a 220 bed hospital. It’s not some massive, behemoth place. We would regularly, on a daily basis, get mass casualty events that involved anywhere from a dozen to 60 people. It was completely insane. As in any mass casualty event, most of them were lightly injured, which was good, but we had huge numbers of children that were badly injured, and lots and lots of people that needed operations. And Gaza European Hospital has four operating rooms.

Actually, I still remember there was a moment where we had a man who had been shot in both sides of his chest. He had chest tubes put in at another hospital and was transferred to us. When he got to us, his blood pressure was very low, and his left chest tube was putting out a lot of blood. So I said that he needed to go upstairs to have his chest opened and surgically repaired. And the hospital just said no. There’s no way to do that. There’s no space, there’s no time, there’s no one to run the anesthetic machine there, so you just can’t do it. I just managed him at the bedside, did a few things, and thankfully he survived, or at least he survived until I left.

But the massive number of civilians—and even if you were to assume that every male of combat age was a combatant, which they certainly weren’t—the huge numbers of just women and children coming in who were obviously civilians was just absolutely insane. It was beyond anything that any hospital of any size could possibly handle, and the injuries that we were seeing were just incredible—they were maiming. The bombs that we’re sending the Israelis are just incredibly powerful. They’re meant to be dropped on bunkers, reinforced military structures, mountains, things like that. They’re not meant to be dropped on poorly constructed apartment buildings. They’re certainly not meant to be dropped on tents. So you can imagine the injuries we saw were just outrageous.

A second crime, at least—I’m not a lawyer, but I would call it a crime—that we saw was the deliberate destruction of the healthcare system, and that was done in multiple ways. One was the targeting of healthcare workers; it was very clear that healthcare workers were a deliberate target of the attack. European hospital is in the south of Gaza, on the southeastern edge of Khan Yunis. And I was there from March 25 to April 8, which was when the Israelis were conducting their fourth and last raid on Al-Shifa Hospital. So a lot of the staff of Al-Shifa had fled, and a lot of them had also been taken in the previous raids of the hospital. And when they were released, they were released to the south of them, and they came to European hospital and just started working because they didn’t have anything else to do. They weren’t paid. They just felt it was the right thing to do. The large majority of them said that when they were taken, they were actually taken from outside the hospital after the hospital was being emptied and everybody was being forcibly evacuated. And as they walked, they [IDF] said, you in the scrubs, you in the scrubs, you in the white coat, you come here. So it was quite clear that they were deliberately picking out healthcare workers of any variety for interrogation, whatever it might have been. So that was one aspect.

The other aspect is just the raw, physical destruction of a huge number of hospitals in Gaza. It’s commonly said that Gaza has 36 hospitals. That’s not really true in terms of anything that you or I would recognize as a hospital. There’s four: Al-Shifa, Indonesian, European, and Nasser Medical Complex on the western side of Khan Yunis. Those are the only four that you would actually recognize as being a hospital. They have a blood bank, significant operative and emergency capacity, and a pharmacy that’s well stocked. Things like that. So we’ve been in a situation where only two of those four are operational at any given moment, and of those four, European is the only one that has not been physically invaded by the Israeli military and just had everything inside of it destroyed. So that’s a major problem. You can’t just destroy everything in a hospital and then let the doctors back in later and say, oh look, we have a hospital again. No, you don’t. You just have a building that doctors happen to be in. So that was the second thing.

And then the third thing was just the starving of the healthcare system with supplies. We only basically had what we brought in with us, and now you can’t even take anything in with you because you have to go through Israel. You can’t go through Rafah anymore. So those three things were major issues, and there were plenty of other things. The starvation was very obvious. There was a lot. 

Robinson 

I want to break some of it down. So one of the things that you mentioned there is that the official death toll statistics are hovering somewhere over 40,000 and have hovered there for a long time. One of the things that your letters have argued is that there is very good evidence that the actual death toll is substantially higher. I believe you peg it closer to well over 100,000. Could you explain why it is that you and other healthcare professionals are confident that the death toll in Gaza is far higher than has been reported?

Sidhwa 

Yes. So just to clarify what we were trying to say there is not that we’re confident or not confident. It’s that, going by the available data—the data that actually exists—it’s impossible to conclude that the death toll is less than 118,000. But I’ll tell you why. The official death count is given by the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is kind of widely impugned because it’s obviously part of the government in Gaza, which is run by Hamas, but the numbers that come out of there have been verified in several different ways by several different academic groups, both before and since October 7. There’s absolutely no question whatsoever that the deaths they’re reporting are real deaths and that they’re actually deaths by violence. They’re only reporting people who actually show up to morgues. This is a very important thing to understand. There was a time when the Gaza media office was also included in the count. Basically, their entire electronic system for capturing and relaying to a central database what the morgues were finding was completely down. I think that was around November and December when Al-Shifa was attacked again.

But now, the Ministry of Health has the morgue system relatively functional and accessible. And so the numbers are only bodies that have shown up to morgues. This is just an anecdote, obviously, but the day before I got to European hospital, there was a bombing in a displaced persons’ area. So, tents. A lot of these people were just shredded. They were dismembered. Their heads over there, their arms are over there, their chest is somewhere else. And somebody just didn’t know what to do, so he put all those body parts in a pickup truck and drove it to European hospital. Well, those people will not be identified. You can make maybe a gross estimate that there are 12 bodies in here or something. There’s no way to know who they are. It’ll never be known if they’re men, women, or children. So, such people are not counted in the dead.

Actually, the Washington Post had a long article just recently—I’m pretty sure it was the Post, to their credit—about deaths in Gaza, told by family members, that there’s no way they’re counting the dead. There are people buried under buildings, people who were simply vaporized during an attack, people who were shredded so badly they’ll never be able to be identified. These are major problems. The number of people who are estimated to be buried under the rubble has been 10,000, but that’s since January. I don’t know how it hasn’t gone up because nobody really has any way of counting. But then the most significant part of the death toll that’s not being reported, and really should be included in the death toll in this particular war, is deaths from starvation and its complications.

I was on another podcast with another fellow, and it’s just important to remember that people don’t starve to death in the way the layperson has an understanding of this. The large majority of people who die because of malnutrition die of an infection. They don’t die looking like a victim from Auschwitz. They will be skinny, of course, but they won’t be the literal skeleton that we think of when we think of starvation during the Holocaust or during African famines, things like that. The large majority of such people die of infections, and they are very likely to be dying in their tents. They’re very likely to be dying in places that are inaccessible, and so they just can’t get to a hospital, they don’t even have cell service, or they do but don’t have electricity to charge a cell phone. There are all sorts of reasons that these people may not be counted in any official death toll. They’re certainly deaths by violence, but they’re not counted.

But the way Alex de Waal, the main historian of famine in the modern period, put it in a Guardian article, maybe four or five months ago now, was that wars are often starvation crimes. I think that’s the way he termed it, and that’s correct. But in this case, the starvation is very clearly deliberate. It’s not hidden by anyone, unless they happen to be talking to an American reporter. So it’s perfectly obvious that the starvation is deliberate and on purpose. And if you look at the data that exists, which admittedly isn’t very good, from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which is the major technical group that monitors starvation and food problems in the world, there’s just no way to conclude that less than 62,000 people have died of starvation. That’s a huge number. Remember, a very large proportion of these will be children under the age of five. So you’re talking about a huge death toll.

But to us, the point wasn’t to say that there is great data to show that this many people have died, because there isn’t. Part of the point we were trying to make is that there’s no way to estimate less than that based on the available data. And it’s kind of shocking to think that we don’t even know if we’ve starved tens of thousands of children to death in Gaza. That’s scary. 

Robinson 

Now, we’ve talked there about deaths, but I’d like to talk about the harm inflicted on the living, on people who survive. One of the accounts that comes up over and over in the testimonies that you collected from doctors who worked in Gaza is people saying that they feel like they’re waiting for death, or children who say they wish they’d died, or they want to die. So perhaps you could talk about the kind of living hell that has been created for survivors who have to live with these terrible injuries, who can’t be treated properly, who have to live with the trauma of the things that they’ve seen, the family members they’ve seen shredded before their eyes. Perhaps you could tell us more about what happens to those people who don’t, in fact, get killed.

Sidhwa 

Yes, aside from the fact that they’re suffering from starvation, people are dealing with total social disruption, repeated displacement, homelessness, unemployment, not having anywhere to even go to the bathroom. In Oxfam’s report, “Water War Crimes,” which is really important—I wish more people read it—they estimated that when the Al-Mawasi area has a half million people in it, there is one toilet for every 4,130 people there. It’s just outrageous. It’s incredibly undignified.

And on top of that, there’s actually probably a million people in Al-Mawasi—we don’t even know. So there might be one toilet for every 8,000 people in that area. This is just totally outrageous. The disease that you can imagine that comes with this is just outrageous. It’s incredible. And again, it mostly affects young children. There just aren’t that many elderly people in Gaza for it to affect. So there’s that. There’s the disease, the displacement, the just general horror.

But then on top of that, there are a few groups that I really think the attack on their mental health should be highlighted. Number one is healthcare workers themselves. Every healthcare worker I met with, maybe a marginal exception, really felt that they were going to die during this war. It’s important to remember that these people are supposed to have a special protected status in international law, but despite that, they’re literally being targeted by the Israelis. It’s really wild. They very much felt that they were just waiting for the next bomb to drop on them, and they just buried themselves in their work until that happened. It was kind of shocking to see, actually.

One of the things that we realized was that we were providing them some semblance of safety by being at their hospital with them. The Israelis might still attack it, but they at least wouldn’t just drop a bomb on it from the air. That’s very unlikely. They’ve done it still, but they are less likely to when there’s a big contingent of foreign physicians there.

The second group of people are children. Just think about, in your own life: how many children, meaning toddlers and preteens, have you ever seen that were suicidal? That’s not a common phenomenon at all. I haven’t seen that anywhere else in the world. And then, just to be clear, this is one of the few things that’s actually widely discussed by professionals: children are wildly suicidal in the Gaza Strip, and that’s very uncommon. Very uncommon. It speaks to the incredible psychiatric distress that they’re undergoing. And again, it’s not that surprising when you think about it. For a year, these children have had their home destroyed over and over again, sometimes 15 times. A lot of them have seen their parents killed in front of them. A lot of them see their siblings killed in front of them. Almost all of them have seen somebody killed in front of them. It’s just totally outrageous. It’s insane.

And then the third thing—I haven’t seen this covered much in the media, but I just can’t imagine it’s not a massive issue—is mothers. Of course, fathers care about their children as well. I don’t want to pretend otherwise. But there’s a woman named Arwa Damon. She used to work at CNN, and now she has an NGO that that helps children in trauma zones like this. And she told a story, I think it was to CNN, about a mom who was talking to her and said that her young son [exhibits] all these signs of trauma—since he saw, as she put it, his sister’s head explode. And then Arwa, talking to the mom a little bit more, finally realized this lady also saw her daughter’s head explode. And then this woman realized that Arwa had realized this, and she said, I know, I understand, I know what you’re thinking, but I have to stay calm because I have children who are still alive. And it’s a remarkable feat that she’s able to do that, but everybody has a limit. Even mothers.

So, these are the things that people are living with. It’s not only the trauma. It’s not only the fact that they can’t get health care. It’s not only the fact that they can’t get the actual surgeries and the prosthetics or anything else. For a year, they’ve been living in this existential dread. It’s just they don’t know where death is going to come.

Robinson

There is the fear, too. The drones hovering over at all times—at any moment, you could be killed. 

Sidhwa

I remember there was a famous quote from probably an anonymous little girl in Afghanistan when we were still occupying Afghanistan, and she said, we used to pray for a blue sky, but now we pray for overcast days because the drones can’t shoot you during those times. What are we doing to children? Just to be clear, every time I say Israel, I should say the United States and Israel. Israel isn’t doing any of this. We are doing this. It’s American planes with Israeli pilots. Maybe they’re Israeli drones, but they wouldn’t be able to—they’re American tanks, it’s American everything. They just happened to be used by Israelis.

Robinson 

And to be clear, they’re children now, and those who are fortunate will grow into adulthood and carry this trauma and these disabilities for their entire lives. I’m sure many of their life expectancies—again, those who survive—will be much shortened. In one of your pieces, you talked about the quantity of rubble in Gaza, and the amount of time it would take to rebuild to the condition it was in before, where it was a place with massive unemployment and poverty and food insecurity. So these things have not just been going on for a year, but even if the war stopped tomorrow, the effects on human beings would last for a decade.

Sidhwa 

Yes, and just to go back to Alex de Waal, that historian of famine, the way he puts it is that famine is a train: you can hit the brakes as hard as you want, but it’s not going to stop immediately. And the same thing is true of the destruction of an entire society. I can’t think of a time—I can’t think of one, maybe unless you go back to the Mongol raids or something like that—when a society was this heavily destroyed in a year. Can you? And certainly, Germany during World War Two doesn’t qualify, Japan during World War Two doesn’t qualify. I really can’t think—other than maybe a local village that’s very isolated, and it was burned. That’s literally the only close parallel I can think of.

The whole place has been destroyed. I was there before the destruction of Khan Yunis was completed. And I remember, we got the opportunity to drive down to Rafah and then up through Al-Mawasi and then back through Khan Yunis. When we were coming back, I just had to say, stop the car for a sec. I just got out and looked around. I was like, where the hell—where are we? There are no buildings that are more than five feet tall here. This is crazy. I remember thinking, if I had grown up in this house right here, I don’t think I would know where I was. That’s the level of destruction. It looked like a nuclear bomb hit the place.

The point is, it’s a disaster, and it’s going to be multigenerational, with absolutely no question. Not only are these children traumatized, but they’ve been malnourished for a year. Their brains are not going to develop normally. And people often talked about the Palestinians just being serial killers and psychopaths and stuff. But if you wanted to make sure that there are people with serious problems, with serious difficulties concentrating, with serious difficulties understanding peaceful resolution of problems, now you’ve guaranteed it for an entire generation, in fact.

Robinson 

The level of horror here is easily preventable. You’ve mentioned the lack of supplies, for instance, the testimonies of your colleagues about how if you had just a basic, functional medical system, people who have died would be alive. With the conditions that you’re working in, people cannot even wash their hands, things that that should be completely basic, and then results in it being so much worse than even the baseline condition of what happens when you drop 2,000-pound bombs in densely populated areas.

Sidhwa 

Yes, if Gaza had the equivalent of any third world healthcare system that I’ve ever worked in, there would be many people who would still be alive. There would be many people who are severely crippled, who would have been partially crippled or not at all. That’s clear as day. I was on some podcast with somebody else—she was one of the other people who signed the letter, Monica. The way she put it was, if I blew up your house and then said it was an accident, maybe somebody would believe me. But what if I then said that an ambulance can’t come to get you? It’s not an accident anymore. It’s just clear as day. That’s not a hard analogy to understand. The Israelis have destroyed the healthcare system on purpose. This complete nonsensical thing about Hamas being under every hospital is just idiotic. When somebody writes a history of this period, and they say that the American media just believes this utter nonsense about Gaza’s hospitals as being Hamas’s commanding control centers, the fact that anybody believes it for two seconds—no one will believe that anybody could have been that credulous. There’s no justification for it.

Robinson 

In one of the letters, I believe, your colleagues affirm that at no point did any of them see militants using medical facilities, which is the allegation that is used to justify the destruction of Gazan health facilities.

Sidhwa 

Yes, exactly. And it’s important to remember, not only did we not see it, anybody who has been there has never seen it. Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian anesthesiologist and emergency physician, worked in Al-Shifa Hospital for, I believe, three decades—for a very, very long time—and he never saw this. The closest anybody has ever been able to get to Hamas using a hospital for military purposes was after the 2014 war Operation Protective Edge. Hamas used an outpatient facility briefly as an interrogation and torture place, which obviously is not good. That’s not nice, but that doesn’t justify blowing up the hospital in 2023. It’s absurd. And then Amnesty International wrote a report about it because it was criminal. No doubt about it. It wasn’t really the use of the building so much that was criminal. It was torture. But it’s just outrageous.

Furthermore, if the presence of a Hamas person justifies blowing up a hospital, why doesn’t the presence of any Israeli soldier justify blowing up a hospital? Does anybody accept that as legitimate? It’s insane. I’m at work right now. If some general happens to walk by here, Russia can’t just drop a bomb on my house. It’s absurd. It’s outrageous. That’s not how international law works. And nobody claims it does. Literally, no one says that that’s the way international law works.

Robinson 

This is kind of a funny thing to me. The accusation has always been, well, Hamas uses human shields. The thing about using human shields is that they’re supposed to be effective. When someone uses a human shield, you’re not supposed to shoot them. That’s why a human shield works. Because we assume that people are humane enough.

Sidhwa 

Yes, the assumption is that people won’t want to kill civilians, and they’ll hesitate. Exactly. And, it’s really funny. I was on a show with a guy named Noam Dworman. 

Robinson 

Oh yes, I saw this.

Sidhwa 

Oh geez, oh gosh. Actually, to be fair, I thought it was a productive conversation. I didn’t know who he was when I went there, so I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but I thought it was fine. Anyway, at one point, because he brought up the human shields thing, I pointed out to him that when Iran attacked the Mossad headquarters with ballistic missiles, I think it was CNN that went there and said, look, there’s all these civilians around. How could Iran possibly safely attack this place? But nobody accused the Israelis of using human shields because that’s not what the term means. You couldn’t drop a nuclear bomb, even if you were aiming at Mossad headquarters, but you can fire ballistic missiles at them if they have some reasonable point of accuracy. So that’s just how war fighting and the laws around war fighting works.

But with Hamas in Gaza, it’s kind of funny because Hamas is constantly accused of using human shields, meaning their own people as human shields, which presupposes that the Israelis care about killing Palestinian civilians, which is ludicrous. This has nothing to do with this totally ahistorical nonsense. But beyond that, Hamas is also accused at the same time of wanting to get as many of its own civilians killed as possible. Okay, fine, but then at the same time, why is it that Israeli soldiers use human shields in Gaza and in the West Bank? If Hamas is trying to get as many of its people killed as possible, why would using Palestinians as human shields for Israelis work? It’s just stupid. None of it even makes any sense, and there’s no evidence for any of it. It’s just ridiculous. But the point is that the attack on hospitals is just outrageous. It is one of the crimes of the century, and the fact that my own government is backing it to such a degree that they won’t even meet with almost 100 doctors who wrote them a letter saying that they witnessed atrocities being carried out with our own weapons, and won’t even acknowledge the letter—and it’s the second letter—is ridiculous. It’s really shocking. Honestly, it’s beyond anything I ever thought would happen.

Robinson 

So you mentioned there your conversation with Noam Dworman, who’s very pro-Israel, obviously, although a relatively somewhat open-minded guy. He’s had Norman Finkelstein on.

Sidhwa 

He seemed willing to listen. 

Robinson 

But the thing is, someone like that has imbibed many talking points and propaganda and misconceptions. I wonder if you could perhaps clear up what you think are some of the most pernicious talking points that people in this country have, people who will only have read U.S. media and who won’t have heard from many Palestinians unless they listen to Democracy Now! or read Current Affairs, or probably haven’t heard from you. What kind of misconceptions do they have about this conflict?

Sidhwa 

Yes, one thing that was interesting is that Noam mentioned that it’s not that he knew nothing about the Arab-Israeli conflict, but he said, I really started learning about it—that was how he put it—after October 7. And I was trying to think, what is wrong with this? Why doesn’t he know the most basic crude facts about this conflict? It’s very strange. And after, when I got home, I was thinking about it more. I should have told him this: if you studied something in school for a year, what would you spend the first year doing? Do you think you would spend it reading random Israeli propaganda outfits like MEMRI, listening to their translated videos? Does a first year master’s degree student dive into primary sources or do they read books? Just read a book on the conflict.

I know there’s a lot of them, fine, but there are many standard histories of the Arab-Israeli conflict, like by Mark Tessler and Benny Morris. I wouldn’t call Norman Finkelstein’s a standard history, it’s not used in schools very much, but it’s still very good. There’s Noam Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle. There are lots of them, and there’s plenty more. Tessler’s is a very neutral perspective. He’s an American—I’m not sure if he’s still a professor or not, but he was an American professor. These books are available. It’s not like they’re hard to find. Benny Morris is a very right-wing guy. He’s not subtle in his beliefs. But if you read the book from start to finish, you won’t come to the same conclusions that he does.

Robinson 

He’s an odd guy. He says, basically, all the charges the leftists make are true, and that’s a good thing. Yes, the occupation is brutal, and, yes, it’s ethnic cleansing, and we should do more of it.

Sidhwa 

Yes. And, again, he’s kind of an honest fellow. He’s a very competent archival historian, that’s very obvious. And he’s got an incredible memory. He has the patience to sit there and go through these archival sources. He was having a discussion somewhere, and it was a pretty hostile audience, and he was still there, which is good, but I think the last question somebody asked was, if you were a Palestinian, would you fight the Israeli occupation? He said, oh yes, no question, that’s not a hard question to answer. So, he’s an honest guy, but he’s also fully enamored of his side. Camus said something like, you can never side against your own mother or some stupid such thing when he was talking about French atrocities in Algeria.

Robinson 

“I would defend my mother before justice.”

Sidhwa 

Yes, something like that. I’m sure you know better than I do. But it’s hard to pick out a few. The Israel-Palestine conflict is shrouded in so much utter nonsense that it’s really, honestly very hard to peel back any one layer of it without having a five-hour discussion with somebody. But I would say a few things.

Number one, the Palestinians are presented with all the subtlety of Godzilla in the American media. It’s like they just walked out of the ocean and started bombing Tel Aviv. It’s crazy. There’s a long history here, and you don’t have to hold a PhD in Middle Eastern studies to understand the history. Again, read any of the standard books on the topic. Again, pick up Mark Tessler’s book, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. It’s long. You got to get through it. It’s not particularly exciting. Just get through it. You will not come out of that book thinking, wow, the Palestinians sure hate Jews. That’s not what it is.

If you read the first edition of Righteous Victims by Benny Morris, you won’t get that impression, either; with the second edition you will because he decided it’s true. But if you read Righteous Victims, Israel’s Border Wars, and Benny Morris’s other books, they are quite straightforward. They’re not hard to understand. You can see what happens with Morris when he’s limited to the archival record: he comes up with a history and a conclusion that makes sense. When he reads the news and incorporates that into it—when he talks about current affairs—then it’s just all my side, my side, my side.

But anyway, I would just try to explain to people that the Palestinians are not just some bizarre antisemitic force of nature that loves killing people. It’s just like any other national liberation movement. Yes, they’ve done some very brutal things. There’s no doubt about that. October 7 wasn’t some joke, and suicide bombings are not some joke. People should understand the vast differential of violence that exists in this conflict. Any time you hear about violence, it’s Palestinian violence. Israelis do bombings. They do shootings, the conflict kills people, but Israelis don’t do violence, kind of like the U.S. We don’t do violence. That’s what other people do. We don’t do terrorism. That’s what other people do.

But let me just give this one statistic. More children under the age of two in Gaza since October 7 have been killed than the entire number of Israeli civilians who were killed in the First Intifada, the Second Intifada, and October 7 combined. I’m not talking about my estimates for starvation or anything, I’m talking confirmed—their names are known, and are known to have been killed by violence. That is shocking, that is absolutely and utterly outrageous, and there’s no reason for it. There is absolutely no justification for this whatsoever. And people who want to claim it’s always Hamas—it’s just Hamas Hamas Hamas Hamas Hamas; Hamas killed all these kids, Hamas forced Israel to kill all these kids. It’s insane. The power differential between these two sides is massive and vast. They are not on the same playing field at all. And to claim that Israel had to kill more 2-year-old kids than all Israeli civilians who were killed in the past 30 years combined is insane. There’s nothing that makes sense with any of these numbers.

I did these calculations a few months ago, so the exact differential will have changed. But if you look at the rate of killing of children in Gaza versus in Ukraine, the rate in Gaza is 600 times higher than in Ukraine. Ukraine is being attacked by Russia. Russia is a huge country. People have probably heard of it. Ukraine is a horrendous—I’ve been there three times, like I mentioned, and it’s very bad. I have plenty of Ukrainians who are friends of mine now, and when I put on my little Facebook page I’m just letting my friends know I’m going to Gaza, they were like, no, don’t do that, dude. Do not do that. Please just come back here instead. Don’t go to Gaza.

Robinson

Go to a safe place like Eastern Ukraine. 

Sidhwa

Well, it’s just wild. They’re not idiots. Ukrainians are remarkably sophisticated people. I’m very proud to have known them, and I’m hoping to go back soon, actually. But it’s just insanity. I would just say the talking point that people should get out of their heads is that this is something that is happening because of Hamas—this Hamas, that Hamas, those Hamas, these Hamas. That’s not what is going on. The United States and Israel have decided to destroy the Palestinian movement. That’s all it is. They’ve decided to make sure that there is no Palestinian state. The U.S. is willing to let Israel do that so that it can continue to be its linchpin of control in the Middle East. That’s what’s going on. It’s not fancy. It’s not super complicated. 

Robinson 

I want to ask you two more quick questions. One is, you published this New York Times op-ed, which was pretty remarkable for appearing there, to be honest. I think some of us were quite surprised when that came out.

Sidhwa 

Me, too.

Robinson 

And people tried to discredit you. You pointed out that so many have seen children shot in the head. A lot of “ballistics experts” popped up on Twitter to say this couldn’t possibly happen. But actually, you have the evidence, and the Times stood by the story. Did you encounter any resistance from the New York Times to saying what you said? Because your conclusion is not just, look at the tragedy, look at the suffering. Your conclusion in that piece is that the United States must stop arming Israel, and we need to take a long, hard look at ourselves as Americans.

Sidhwa 

What’s interesting to me about the criticism of the piece, including even the three letters that they published, is that none of them actually seem to look at the conclusion. One letter said, I think he went too far in saying that we should stop arming Israel. Okay, well, it’s been a year. But that’s fine. That’s your opinion. The second was, how could we let such a horrible thing happen? I have to give the Times credit for publishing the opinion piece in the first place, but it kills me that they did this. The third was a letter from, I believe, the president of the American Jewish Medical Association. And why is that the letter they chose to publish? I understand that they sent it. That’s fine. But what does it have to do with Jews? Nothing. I’m sorry, it kind of pisses me off. You can see this is not a conflict between Jews and other people, at least not in the United States. It’s not. I can’t remember the exact numbers now, but something like 40 percent of young American Jews not only think what Israel is doing in Gaza is wrong but believe it’s genocidal. That’s a huge number. And actually, right after the Times published our piece, Haaretz translated the entire thing into Hebrew and published it in on their site as well. After that, just maybe a few days ago, I got a letter from 150 Israelis physicians—I think it’s up to 250 now, by the way—endorsing our letter to the Biden administration. And that letter was sent not to Netanyahu, but to Biden. That’s how desperate they are. And the Jewish American Medical Association president is saying that I’m being hurtful. Okay. Why don’t you go talk to your Jewish colleagues in Israel and see what they think about it? Is theirs a majority opinion? No, of course not—of the Israeli physicians, of course it’s not a majority opinion. It’s a very nationalistic and right-wing country now. But just setting this up as a conflict between Jews and other people, that’s not what it is. So that killed me, that really made me upset.

But anyway, what I have to say is, when I stood firm in wanting to say something to the Times, they would push back on plenty of things, for sure, which I wasn’t surprised by. But I have to be honest, I never expected that piece to be published. I was absolutely sure that they were not going to publish it, and I would just end up putting it on Common Dreams or something.

Robinson 

But you did have to have 65 people backing you up.

Sidhwa 

Yes, and that’s the thing. And it’s so funny because people are like, we knew the Times is anti-Israel. If the Times were anti-Israel, this is what would have happened: there would have been 65 different pieces because they would have sought out doctors coming back from Gaza. There would have been 65 different pieces, meaning for a year, five a month, saying, this is what Dr. Feroze said when he came back; this is what Dr. [Syed] said when she got back; this is what nurse Monica saw. So it would have been like 60-65 separate pieces about this, not one opinion piece, and they would have been news. So if they were anti-Israel, that’s what they would have done. But I think this just got to the point that they couldn’t ignore it. Again, this is to the Times’ credit, or at least the credit of the visual opinion team. They reached out to me and asked me to write the piece. Credit where credit’s due. It should have been published a year ago—not that that exact piece, obviously, but something akin to it could have easily been published a year ago, and it honestly could have been published after Cast Lead and after Protective Edge. But I suppose better late than never.

Robinson 

And finally, I want to bring this conversation back to where we started, with your letter to the Biden administration and the fact that you’ve gotten no response. You mentioned in one of your answers that you believe it’s pretty clear that the Biden administration has just made the decision that it is willing to let Israel obliterate any chance of Palestinian self-determination. We’re a few days away from the election. Many people are being called upon to go to the polls and put Kamala Harris in to succeed Joe Biden. Many are hopeful—I might consider it wishful thinking—that Kamala Harris will change this policy. So perhaps you could just say a few words about the last year of the Biden administration policy and how difficult it’s been to get really any movement or even acknowledgement from this White House.

Sidhwa

Yes. It’s frustrating, to be sure, but I think it speaks to the depravity of American politics in general. I mean mainstream American politics, Democrats versus Republicans. It occurred to me the other day that we don’t actually have a political party in the United States that is opposed to genocide on principle. That’s wild. That’s very scary. The United States is an incredibly powerful country. The so-called left wing party, the Democrats, are not opposed to genocide on principle.

Robinson 

I think the Green Party would interject there. 

Sidhwa 

Yes, the Green Party, of course. Jill Stein has been very vocal about this, as has Cornell West, which isn’t surprising, because something like 80 percent of the country wants us to stop sending arms to Israel. And on top of that, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and all the rest of these Democratic people have been going around for at least since Trump left office, probably since before then, saying that Donald Trump is the greatest threat to American democracy that has ever existed. You hear it all the time everywhere. I don’t disagree with them, actually, in some ways. But just think about it. All they had to do was say, and by the way, we’re opposed to genocide, so we’re going to stop sending arms to Israel, and then win this election with no question whatsoever by a mile. I don’t pay any attention to these polling things because it makes me want to jump off a roof, so I don’t know who will win the election. It’s hard to tell. Is it close? Is it not close? I don’t really care. I shouldn’t say that—I do care, but I just don’t have the bandwidth to figure it out.

But let me give you another example: just maybe two weeks ago now, Israel announced that COGAT, which is the Israeli office that coordinates between humanitarian organizations and the Israeli military, is going to cut—it was hard to get exact numbers—either six or eight international NGOs from access to Gaza and is no longer going to allow them in. It’s not hard to figure out what they were. I can’t remember their names off the top of my head, but five are registered American NGOs, run by Americans, but with boards that have people who are of Arab ethnicity. That’s it. That’s all it is. And this was maybe a few days after the New York Times article came out. And, even more shockingly, it was just after the Biden administration had a letter leaked to the Times of Israel in which they said that Israel has to massively increase the amount of humanitarian aid going into Gaza. Otherwise, they’re going to have to face possible consequences under NSM-20 [National Security Memorandum]. Now, Blinken immediately walked that back once the letter was released. It doesn’t matter. The point is, all Harris has to do, even if she didn’t come out against arming Israel, is to say, when I am President, all five of those NGOs will be immediately reinstated, or we’ll give up arms. Everybody knows Israel would agree to let those people back in. They’re not going to die on that hill. That’s absurd. They can still kill everyone in Gaza just because Fajr Scientific and Palestinian American Medical Association sent a few doctors in. It doesn’t stop them from doing anything. She won’t even do that. That’s outrageous.

Robinson 

Or commit to enforcing U.S. law.

Sidhwa 

Yes. And also—the New York Times, again, to their credit—Peter Beinart wrote a column in which he said Harris can differentiate herself from Biden by simply saying that she will enforce the law. That’s some revelation that has to be mentioned in the New York Times before the executive branch figures it out. That’s wild! That says something about our own culture, our own society, our level of understanding of the world, of what we’re doing. Is the rule of law important or not? Does it only matter that people in poor, Black neighborhoods have to adhere to the rule of law, or does the president of the United States also have to do that? It’s just totally indefensible. The whole situation is so outrageous, and it’s very hard to fathom. We have a lot of work to do in our own country. That’s why I said in the article, and I why I wrote it, it’s not about Israel. People can claim it’s anti-Israel—I don’t care. I don’t really care anymore. I’m tired of hearing it. But people can claim it is all they want. It’s about the United States, and it’s as pro-American as you can get. I didn’t call for death to America. I called for us to take a look at ourselves. Why are we enacting this? Why are we doing this? We ought not to.

I was in Burkina Faso just before the Democratic National Convention, and I gave a talk there. I just got five minutes to talk, and I pointed out that the U.S. has kind of gone insane. I likened it to the way the South resurrected slavery after the Civil War. And everybody just knew what to say, when to say it; who to kill, who not to kill; who to beat up, who not to beat up; what laws really matter, what laws don’t really matter. I just finished reading a book by Douglas Blackmon on the topic, so it’s on my mind—Slavery by Another Name. It’s a very good book. And I pointed out that I see the same collective insanity taking hold here now. And it’s not just the South, obviously. Now, it’s the whole country.

But I had been in Burkina Faso, which is this very small, poor country just north of Ghana. It’s one of the poorest countries in the world. I was just there for a week. I was going around doing NGO work for my buddy’s NGO, Pull for Progress. We were at the university, and there were a lot of people who spoke English, and so they were talking to me asking, do you only come to Burkina Faso, or do you go elsewhere? I said, no, I’ve been in Ukraine and the West Bank, and I was in Gaza recently, and they stopped and said, you were in Gaza? And then they would just say, can you explain why America is doing this? This was like a universal response. I was very surprised by how sophisticated they were regarding this specific issue because they don’t get any international news there. Why is America doing this? They didn’t ask that about Israel. They didn’t. They said, why is America doing this? And it’s a very hard question to answer. We really have a lot of work to do with ourselves, and I’m glad magazines like yours exist. I don’t read Current Affairs every day, but you guys are definitely trying to make people understand these ideas.

Robinson 

We just released last week this new book with Noam Chomsky called The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World. The central message Professor Chomsky and I collaborated on for that book is that America needs to take a long, hard look at itself. And there’s a chapter about Israel-Palestine in that.

Sidhwa 

And the title of that book is really the central theme of, I would say, all of Chomsky’s political work for a long time. It’s true, American foreign policy is—it’s not the only problem in the world, certainly, but it is very, very, very dangerous. I don’t think people have a full appreciation of how bad, how dangerous, and how close the world stays virtually all the time to ultimate destruction. It’s very scary.

Robinson 

Meanwhile, convinced of our own righteousness and ability.

Sidhwa 

Our leaders are. And I know Noam had a stroke, so he can’t speak for himself. I certainly don’t want to speak for him, but I do think that he would point out that if that was an intrinsic feature of our society, then billions upon billions of dollars in an entire industry wouldn’t have to be dedicated to convincing people of it. And so there’s a lot of opportunity for us to do something about that.

Robinson 

When we say America, we’re often talking about the state. The people often just don’t know anything about it.

Sidhwa 

Because it’s deliberately hidden from them. Yes, they’re deliberately confused. And I think journals like Current Affairs have a lot to contribute to [revealing] that.

 

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.