Israel Against The (Civilized) World | ArtiFact 54: Mouin Rabbani, Alex Sheremet

The Hamas attack of October 7 was preceded by a number of escalations: ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Jerusalem, Netanyahu’s threats to annex Palestine, encroachments into the Al Aqsa Mosque, the rise of the Lion’s Den movement and Unity Intifada, as well as Israeli-Arab normalization agreements (“Abraham Accords”) which excluded Palestinians. In ArtiFact 54, Middle East scholar Mouin Rabbani joins Alex Sheremet to discuss the prehistory of October 7, Joe Biden’s lifelong desire to protect Israel at all costs, myths about the Netanyahu government, and the region’s future.

You can also watch this discussion on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiKIenWoC-I

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Mouin Rabbani’s Twitter page: https://twitter.com/MouinRabbani

Mouin Rabbani in “Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm” (OR Books): https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/deluge/

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Timestamps:

1:10 – a pre-history of the October 7 Hamas attack

3:00 –Joe Biden’s “strategic neglect” policy towards Palestine

4:48 – how Joe Biden tried to restrain Barack Obama’s pro-Palestinian instincts; West Bank violence before the Hamas attack; Joe Biden as Netanyahu’s “point man”; the Unity Intifada; Israel’s attacks on Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem prior to the Hamas attack; Hamas as an Islamist organization

16:01 – Israelis might protest Netanyahu, but they don’t really protest apartheid; why Mouin does not think Saudi Arabian / Israeli normalization was “the thing” that caused the Hamas attack; what Saudi Arabia sought through normalization; if Israel’s massacres in Lebanon did not affect normalization, the destruction of Gaza might not either

28:35 – the logical conundrum of a 2-state settlement; Israeli peace activists are often not what they claim; why Netanyahu himself is not “the reason” for the Gaza war; Netanyahu will not be imprisoned for his failings

38:42 – Israeli society seems to crave images of war crimes; comparing IDF imagery to the Abu Ghraib scandal in America

41:40 – what has changed since the start of the Gaza siege; prospects for normalization; how America has eroded all credibility in the Middle East; the end of America’s “rules-based international order”

Tags: #middleeast #politics #palestine