Radio: I Discuss Israel’s War on Gaza with Andy Bungay of Riverside Radio

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I’m pleased to post below an interview about Israel’s war on Gaza that I undertook two weeks ago with Andy Bungay of Riverside Radio, a community radio station in Wandsworth, which was previously included in a podcast here.

I hope you have time to listen to it, and that you’ll find it interesting. Anyone who knows my work will know that, when it comes to Guantánamo, which I’ve been writing about and speaking about for 17 years, I can talk about it eloquently at any time of the day or night, but this interview was the first time that I’d spoken publicly about Israel and Palestine. I have subsequently discussed it with Chris Cook on his Gorilla Radio show in Victoria, Canada, and I’m more than willing to discuss it in future with anyone who is interested in my perspective.

In my interview with Andy, I discussed my revulsion at Israel’s actions in Gaza, where, as of November 14, 11,320 people have been killed, including 4,650 children and 3,145 women, suggesting that it amounts to a genocide, a conclusion reinforced by several assessments, in the last few weeks, by experts in genocide.

The interview, divided into two ten-minute segments, is posted below, on my YouTube channel (here and here), and I hope you find my assessment of the situation to be of interest, and that you’ll share the videos if you do.

With reference to genocide (which I also wrote about here and here), the first expert to explicitly state that Israel is engaged in a genocide in Gaza was Craig Mokhiber, the director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, who, on October 28, called it “a text-book case of genocide” in an extraordinary letter of resignation, in which he lamented that the UN has persistently “failed in our duty to meet the imperatives of prevention of mass atrocities, of protection of the vulnerable, and of accountability for perpetrators”, with particular reference to “successive waves of murder and persecution against the Palestinians throughout the entire life of the UN.”

More recently, 45 experts signed a statement from the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) at Queen Mary University of London, declaring that Israel “is employing its extensive and advanced military capacity to inflict violence on Palestinian peoples on such a scale that it is accurate to frame it as the annihilation phase of genocide”, and yesterday 36 UN experts inched closer to a similar assessment, calling on the international community “to prevent genocide against the Palestinian people”, and stating that the “[g]rave violations committed by Israel against Palestinians in the aftermath of 7 October, particularly in Gaza, point to a genocide in the making.”

In my interview with Andy, I also discussed the history of the Zionist project, the shameful and unquestioning support of Israel’s actions by western governments, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, which has been cut off from supplies of water, food, fuel and medical supplies since October 8, and my hope that there will, eventually, be a ceasefire, although sadly we still seem no closer to that now than we were when this interview was conducted two weeks ago, on November 4.

Despite all this time elapsing, the horrible rise in the death toll, the increasing barbarity of Israel’s “complete siege”, and recent and completely unjustifiable attacks on Gaza’s hospitals, it’s genuinely quite dispiriting to realize how fundamentally the Israeli government remains unchallenged in its extraordinary pursuit of collective punishment, genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, which is shattering any notion that international humanitarian law still means anything, and is revealing governments around the world to be either thoroughly weak or compromised, or horribly and unforgivably complicit in Israel’s crimes, for which they must never be forgiven.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.