“I’m a man—Jewish, white, Ashkenazi,” Litman told me, listing the traits that bring him privilege in Israeli society. “It’s almost not moral to live in such a place in such dark times and not speak up.”
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Blaming the Victim: Roots of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Interviewed by David Barsamian
Boulder Public Library, Boulder, CO 12 September 2024
Introduction
David: Welcome to the program.
Richard: Thank you.
David: Families are always an interesting place to start. They’re such fertile ground. You were born in Trenton, New Jersey. Tell me about your parents. Did they have strong political views?
Richard: Everybody in my family, both my mother’s side and my father’s side were liberal Democrats. My uncle was the founder of the National Lawyers Guild and a lawyer for the Communist Party. Many of them were kind of atheists. I wouldn’t say they were pure atheists, but as for me, I attended Reform synagogue from the time I was five years old through age 14, and I went to Saturday and Sunday schools. Summers I usually spent, up until about age 12, at Jewish community center camps. I had a lot of Jewish and non-Jewish friends. I grew up in a neighborhood that was not Jewish.
David: And did your folks and siblings have views about Israel?
Richard: People call me an ex-Zionist. I never thought of myself as a Zionist. The subject was never discussed. The only thing I ever heard discussed was the Holocaust, because every Jewish family I knew, including one of my best friends, had memberswho’d been killed in the Holocaust,and when I say one of my best friends, his parents, his father had escaped one of the concentration camps by killing a Nazi guard, and they both showed me their brands that had been branded into their forearms, and that was very significant. I was like 10 years old when they showed me. So, the thing I would hear at synagogue a lot after Saturday services, for example, I’d hear the men talking and they would say things like, I was 10 or 11 years old, but I remembered it. They would say things like, “If a nuclear bomb is going to explode somewhere in the world, it’s going to start in the Middle East,” and, “Thank God the Arabs are not united. They can never get it together, so that’s why they’re not able to destroy Israel.”
Except Gamal Abdel Nasser came along, and Nasser was a pan-Arabist, and he was a charismatic leader. David Ben-Gurion, the leader of Israel, referred to him as “Hitler on the Nile,”and thatmade a big impression on me because we had photographs of Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann in our Sunday school, Saturday school classes. Chaim WeizmannwasthefirstpresidentofIsrael.AndIsawthese older, wise men protecting the Jews from another Holocaust. That’s kind of how I looked at it. And so, when Nasser came along and was referred to as the Hitler on the Nile, that evoked images of concentration camps, of another Holocaust, and it really influenced how I felt about the subject of Israel-Palestine. Plus, when you read the Old Testament, the Jews are always fighting with one tribe or another, one nationality or another. So, it really all played a large role in how I developed my views. Plus, I experienced some anti-Semitism growing up.
David: You used the term Zionism. What is Zionism?
Richard: Zionism is a political movement. It’s a nationalist ideology whose goal is the establishment of a Jewish state. However, Zionism was based on the premise that where Jews go, anti-Semitism erupts. So, the ideology of Zionism requires, not only requires a Jewish state, but it requires the expulsion ofnon-Jews becausethey’represumedtobeanti-Semites. So, for example, the U.S. State Department in 1943 said Zionism is a nationalist ideology that refers to Judaism as both a religion and a nationality and its ideology is based on blood and soil much like the Nazis. And this was in 1943.
Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, the great philosopher, and 26 other Jews wrote a letter to the New York Times in 1948 calling the Revisionist stream of Zionism. That’s the right wing of Zionism. That was the Vladimir Jabotinsky whose secretary was Benjamin Netanyahu’s father. The Revisionists were right wing. The David Ben-Gurion wing were more like socialists.
Anyway, Einstein called the Revisionist wing and the Herut Party, which is now called Likud, which is today’s ruling party. He called them fascists and terrorists, and Einstein said, “I hope the Jews don’t do to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews.” So, Zionism is kind of a malignant ideology that has grown out of control because it’s not just nationalistic. It presumes that Jews are a superior people to everybody else.
David: On October 24th, a little more than two weeks after the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel, UN Secretary General António Guterres said, “It’s important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence, their economies stifled, their people displaced, and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing. But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas, and those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
(And let me just say, Hamas is an Arabic acronym. It stands for Islamic Resistance Movement.)
But go to what Secretary General Guterres said and the importance of context.
Listen to a sample of this interview
Richard: The context is everything because first of all, what are the Palestinians supposed to do? Every time they have demonstrated nonviolently, Israel has crushed them. The two most prominent situations were the first Intifada, which began in 1987, and in the first year of the first Intifada, the Palestinians, depending on the source, whether you look at B’Tselem, which is the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, or Al-Haq, Law in the Service of Man, between zero and six Israelis were killed in the first year of the first Intifada, while Israel killed more than 200 Palestinians, imprisoned thousands, deliberately broke the bones of demonstrators according to the instructions of Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, and also deported and imprisoned every single leader of civil disobedience and nonviolence among the Palestinian people.
Then throughout their history, the Palestinians have always been suppressed. Israel needs the world to see the Palestinians as a violent people. So, for example, during the first Intifada, Israel made sure while imprisoning or deporting all of the leaders of nonviolence, they armed Hamas and allowed Hamas’s leader Sheikh Yassin to hand out anti-Semitic hate literature calling for the overthrow of the Jewish state. That they allowed, but they didn’t allow nonviolent demonstrations at all.
And then you come to 2018, of course, the period in between ’87 and 2018 has really been a series of mostly nonviolent resistance. But in 2018, the Palestinians created the Great March of Return in Gaza, and it was kind of like a picnic. The Gazans, 70 to 80% of whom are refugees, who attended the Great March of Return were calling on
Israel to allow them to return to the homes their families were kicked out of in 1948 and 1967, and they were also calling on Israel to treat them like human beings.
So, what did Israel do? Israel had highly trained snipers stationed beyond the fence separating Israel and Gaza behind large earth mounds shooting people. They killed 57 people that day, including children. They wounded over 3000. They used bullets that were fabricated to maim people for life. So, they would shoot at people’s legs. And then because Israel wouldn’t allow the people out of Gaza to get modern medical care, and because Israel doesn’t allow a lot of medical equipment into Gaza, a lot of these people had to have their legs amputated who might’ve avoided that. So, the day after this first day of the March of Return, the IDF tweeted, and they eventually removed this because they realized how stupid it was to say this, the IDF tweeted that they were able to account for every single person there. They knew what everybody was doing, and they didn’t waste a single bullet. 57 dead people, 3000 injured.
This is an example. What is Hamas to do? They’re living in extremely impoverished conditions where the children have the highest rate of diarrhea, the children under five, the highest rate of diarrhea in the world. There’s a huge number of children with malnutrition. This is before October 7th, by the way. And 93% of the water is undrinkable. What are they supposed to do? The only thing they can do. They resisted. Hamas is a resistance movement. Yes, they have used terror attacks. It’s just like the IRA, the Mau Mau of Kenya, the National Liberation Front of Algeria, and many other resistance groups. Just like the Irgun, the Stern Gang, and the Haganah, the Jewish resistance groups that pioneered the use of bombs in the marketplace, drive-by shootings, bus bombs.
Listen to a sample of this interview
And they were so vicious, they killed more Jews than any other demographic because they killed Jews who talked about making peace with the indigenous people. They killed Jews who did business with Arabs. They killed Jews who liked Arabs and were friends with Arabs. But the difference between the Mau Mau, the National Liberation Front, Hamas, the IRA, et cetera, and the Irgun, Stern Gang and Haganah, is that whereas the former were indigenous people trying to expel a foreign invader, the latter were the foreign invader trying to expel the indigenous people. So, whataretheysupposedtodo?Livetheirlivesasthird-class citizens dying, having no future? No, they had to rebel.
David: You could add the African National Congress to that list and Nelson Mandela that were routinely described by the U.S. State Department and whoever’s in the White House as a terrorist organization and Mandela as a terrorist.
Richard: And by the way, Hamas has made more than 15 offers since 1988 for peace, and those offers have been acknowledged by Jimmy Carter, the New York Times, the U.S. Army War College at the Strategic Studies Institute, a number of former Mossad chiefs and Shin Bet head. Shin Bet is the internal Israeli security agency. Israel will not respond to those offers because they don’t want to make peace.
David: The UN calls Gaza “a graveyard.” There are 41,000 dead Palestinians, and the number is considerably higher according to The Lancet, which is a respected British medical journal.
Ralph Nader has said the same and others. Many are buried below the rubble, and thousands and thousands are simply missing. The destruction of homes and infrastructure is widespread, and the term genocide has been injected at least into the discourse for the first time on a sustained basis.
Raz Segal, who happens to be Israeli, he’s a historian and he teaches at Stockton University in New Jersey. He said that what Israel is doing in Gaza, I’m quoting, “is a textbook case of genocide.”
Another distinguished Israeli historian is Ilan Pappé, and he says basically the same thing. What Israel is doing constitutes a genocide.
The International Court of Justice, the ICJ in the Hague ruled Israel was committing what it called “plausible genocide.”
The Israeli government vehemently denies the charge of genocide saying it is acting in self-defense in response to Hamas’s October 7th attack. They say a state has the obligation to protect its citizens. So, what would you say to the Israeli government official who argues that line?
Richard: I would say that Israel is doing exactly what they said they were going to do. Netanyahu immediately after October 7th referred to the Palestinians as Amalekites, which is a termhehas usedover his career, andhehas saidinthepast, “Remember what Amalek did to you.”Well,Amalek killed a bunch of Jews in the desert. This is in Exodus. And God told Moses to kill every last Amalekite, women and children, their sheep, their cattle, everything, totally destroy them. 200 years later or so, King Saul killed all the Amalekites except for the king. He let the king live, and then the king had a child, and then subsequently to that Haman, who was descended from the Amalekites, wanted to destroy all the Jews of Persia. And then, of course, that’s the book of Esther. But the point is that watch out for the goyim. They want to kill you.
Listen to a sample of this interview
And so, Netanyahu said that we should turn Gaza into an island of ruins. Numerous, numerous members of Knesset, including Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, Netanyahu’s coalition partners, called for total genocide. Rabbis were saying you have to kill everybody, no matter what their age. I did hear one rabbi say, “Kill all the Palestinians. You can leave the children under the age of four. You can let them live but kill everybody else.” They’re doing exactly what they said they were going to do, and they’ve been sayingthat for generations, though not as vehemently since October 7th. So, whether you call it genocide or not, the numbers speak for themselves and the conditions speak for themselves.
David: Israel has, uncontested, a very powerful military. It has nuclear weapons, which it refuses to acknowledge to be part of the NPT, Non-Proliferation Treaty. It refuses to be part of that. Could Israel carry out what it’s doing in Gaza without U.S. support?
No, I don’t think so.
David: Why not?
Richard: The United States contributes about 30% of Israel’s defense budgetwith itsbillionsofdollarsthatitgivesIsrael every year, and Israel would not even be able to maintain the occupation. Of course, they’re helped by the Palestinian Authority, which almost every Palestinian I’ve met, there’s been a couple exceptions, considers them collaborators with Israel. We’ve seen how Israel has needed weapons from the United States just in the last 11 months. In fact, I’ve heard Israeli analysts say that if the United States placed an embargo on weapons to Israel, Israel would not be able to continue this for more than a few months. And why doesn’t the United States do it? It’s just unbelievable. They’re allowing this to happen.
David: A little bit of history, the foundational myth of Israel is a land without people for a people without a land, but Israelis knew that that was a myth. War hero and defense minister Moshe Dayan said, “We came to a region of land that was inhabited by Arabs.” Even the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 acknowledged that there were, “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” It’s interesting they did not say the word Arab or Palestinian. At that time of the Balfour Declaration, the Jewish population of Palestine was 60,000. Do you know what the Arab population was?
Richard: At that time?
David: 700,000. Of course, later the Jewish population increased, because of immigration and what the British were doing crushing the Palestinian revolt from ’36 to ’39. Ariel Sharon, this is a really interesting quote given what’s going on today. He was a famous Israeli general and later became prime minister. He was asked in 1973 by a British journalist who happened to be the grandson of Winston Churchill, by the way, Churchill asked him what would become of the Palestinians, and Sharon said, “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in twenty-five year’s time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody will be able to tear it apart.” Would you say Sharon’s prediction has pretty much happened?
Listen to a sample of this interview
Richard: I would definitely say it’s pretty much happened.
David: Where are we now with settlements and settlers? And I’ve always wondered why we’re using these euphemisms as opposed to colonies and colonizers. Isn’t that much more accurate?
Richard: Yes. I consider the settlers mostly ideological, which means they’re religious. But those settlers, I consider them terrorists. I consider the State of Israel a terrorist state because the State of Israel knows what the settlers are doing. It allows them to do it. They’re protected by the Israeli military. So,for example, if settlers gointoavillage, and let’s say the mothers bring their five-year-old children and teach them to throw stones and eggs at Palestinian children leaving kindergarten for the day, the soldiers just watch. If Palestinians get upset, the soldiers make sure they don’t interfere. The soldiers are not even allowed to interfere with the settlers’ activity. So, if the settlers go in and start beating up Palestinians with bats, which they used to do and they still do, the soldiers, sometimes they participate, but they do not interfere. The settlers are basically a de facto volunteer vigilante squad of the Israeli military.
Richard: By the way, I don’t know if you know this, the West Bank is no longer under military occupation as it has been for decades. It is now under civilian occupation. The government of Israel turned over the administration of the occupation to Bezalel Smotrich, the head of the National Religious Party, a religious Zionist party. He is one of the coalition members.
David: And Minister of Finance.
Richard: And Minister of Finance, and he wants to get rid of all of the Palestinians.
David: These colonists are encouraged to migrate to the West Bank and are given massive tax breaks and housing subsidies. This is state policy Does this qualify as settler colonialism?
Richard: It does qualify. Not only is Israel extending its settlement enterprise, there’s over a hundred outposts that are considered illegal under international lawthat Israel allows to operate, and some of them eventually become part of a settlement. They expand and then they merge into a settlement. Israel is doing nothing to stop them. It even provides these illegal outposts with electricity and water. And by the way, so as Golda Meir said, former prime minister, Israel doesn’t have boundaries. Israel’s boundaries are where Jews live. So that means that the boundaries of Israel extend to wherever a Jew happens to move to. So suddenly where a Palestinian is living is not part of Israel, but then all of a sudden, a Jewish settler evicts the Palestinian, and now it’s part of Israel. And the Jewish settler is entitled to all the rights that Israeli civilians have within Israel proper.
I don’t blame any Jew who suffered through the Holocaust from wanting to live in a country where they’d never see a non-Jew again. But most Jews did not want to go to Israel. Only 3% of Israel’s Jews during World War I were members of Zionist organizations. Pretty much the samepercentagewas trueof theUnitedStates. After World War II, the survivors of Dachau concentration camp were interviewed, and a poll was taken. Only fifteen-percent of them wanted to go to Palestine at the time, and probably half of them would’ve returned because that’s a lot of people who would settle, who thought they would move to Palestine, found out they didn’t like it, and then they would return to Western Europe usually, or possibly even Eastern Europe.
Listen to a sample of this interview
ButmypointisthattheState of Israelwouldnever, ever have been born without the Holocaust. Nobody would’ve voted for Israel to have a state of their own without the Holocaust. But most of the people who survived the Holocaust didn’t want to go to Israel. They were forced to by the Zionist organizations who blocked the United States and Western Europe from taking in one hundred-percent of European Holocaust survivors.
David: Didn’t FDR have a plan in 1944?
Richard: Correct. FDR had a plan, which he got Western Europe to agree to, where they would take in a hundred percent of the Jewish Holocaust survivors. He sent the attorney, who was Jewish, Morris Ernst of the ACLU. Ernst went to the Zionist groups in the United States thinking they’d be happy about this, and they called Ernst a self-hating Jew and anti-Semite. They went crazy because they didn’t want Jews coming anywhere but to Palestine, because Palestine needed enough Jewish people, enough Jewish bodies so they could make the case for a Jewish state.
David: And what’s happening in East Jerusalem?
Richard: The settlers are taking it over. There are all these crazy laws whereif someone, if aPalestineleaves East Jerusalem a certain number of years, then once he’s out of there for that number of years, he loses total residency, the ability to live in East Jerusalem. The Jewish settlers keep taking over more and more of East Jerusalem. They use fake deeds. They claim that they have deeds from a hundred years ago to houses that Palestinians have lived in for 50 years. At the end of 1948, I think it was, at the end of the 1948 war, Jordan turned over a lot of properties to Palestinians, but Jordan didn’t have the sense to provide them with deeds, so these families have lived in these houses for 70 years, but the Jewish settlers are coming along and just kicking them out, by force of course, and the blessing of the Israeli government.
David: I happen to be Armenian. There’s an Armenian quarter in East Jerusalem that’s also being squeezed by the Israeli policies.
Richard: That’s right.
David: Evangelical Christians are strong supporters of Israel. You write about this in your book. In particular, you mention Reverend John Hagee of the 7 million strong Christians United for Israel. What’s that about? Why are evangelical Christians such strong supporters of Israel?
Hagee, first of all, he believes that he has 50 million followers.
David: 50 million?
Richard: That’s what he says. Hagee, who said that Hitler was a “half-breed Jew” who shepherded the Jews to the Holy Land. Hagee believes, and by the way, Hagee and a lot of other dispensationalists believe that Jews are guilty of the crime of killing Christ. They’re guilty of the crime of deicide, which is the only unpardonable sin. This is anti-Semitism. Hitler was a Jew. Hitler was a half-breed Jew. He had to shepherd the Jews to the Holy Land because the people who didn’t listen to Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, were committing crimes. Anyway, they believe in the Second Coming, and for the Second Coming to happen, Israel has to be totally populated by Jews, and then when the second coming happens, which will happen after the apocalypse and the revelations or something like that, whenthesecondcominghappens,theJewswilleitherhave to convert to Christianity or die in a fiery pit, which is hell. There are some streams that say that 144,000 Jews will remain alive. But my guess is that they will have to convert to Christianity. But this is what they actually believe. So, the Jews are happy to take their money. Christians United for Israel raises millions of dollars. In fact, Ariel Settlement, which is one of the biggest illegal settlements in Palestine, named their convention center the John Hagee Convention Center. At the same time, they’re calling Jimmy Carter, who loves the Jewish people and loved many of the Jewish leaders, an anti-Semite. But John Hagee who believes that Hitler was a half-breed Jew is revered by these people. This is how crazy the mind gets when it’s filled with existential fear and confusion, which I believe are the hallmarks of separative identity.
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David: B’Tselem, which is an Israeli human rights organization, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch all have determined that Israel is an apartheid state. This has barely been reported. But then the supporter of Israel might say, “This is more ganging up against the Jews. They’re being singled out.”
Richard: They always do that. First of all, they do that because of their paranoia, because they have a belief. Again, it’s instilled in them through Zionist ideology, but it’s taught to them as children. David Ben-Gurion was an atheist. David Ben-Gurion, however, believed that the Bible was the most accurate historical document possible, and it should be taught in schools. So, they’re taught from the time they’re children in kindergarten that there are all these enemies of theJews. Infact, onewomanI know, Maya Wind,you may have heard of her. Her husband is Eran Efrati. He was with Breaking the Silence and one of its spokespersons. Maya was with ICAHD, Jeff Halper’s group, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. She also was one of the first female refuseniks.
Anyway, Maya told me that beginning in kindergarten, when you go to school, above the blackboard are pictures of Israel’s enemies. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Romans, blah, blah, blah, the Palestinians, and they show them as all Jew haters. And even in 1985, a Jewish organization conducted an educational study of the schools, and they found that 80% of the children in these schools thought that Palestinians were dirty. 75% thought that all, well, actually all Arabs were terrorists, and 90% believed that the Palestinians had no right to Israel-Palestine at all. This is in 1985 when things were so much calmer than they are today. Things have only gotten worse since then.
David: Why is that?
Richard: I think it’s because there’s a reaction to the world becoming more and more aware of what Israel’s doing to the Palestinian people. There’s the internet, so people can see more clearly just what Israel is doing. The Arab countries have gotten more cohesive and organized and connected with each other. They’re not real good, but they’re able to promote the Palestinian cause. There are a lot of answers. And then existential fear. Existential fear continues to grow as their leaders continue to teach them that the world hates Jews. And also, the leaders of Israel since Menachem Begin have been more right-wing than left-wing. Menachem Begin came in I think in the mid-seventies. And so, the right-wing is definitely far more hysterical, let’s say, or far more bigoted toward Palestinians. They don’t have much generosity toward Palestinians. Netanyahu, if you read Netanyahu’s writings or hear him talk from the time he was in his twenties, he really believes that Arabs are eternal enemies of the Jews and that they are subhuman. And pretty much most of the Israeli prime ministers have said that. And the chiefs of staff, when you read what they say, it’s just horrifying.
David: Among the U.S. political class, there’s a strong bipartisan support for Israel with a few exceptions. But Harris, Biden and Blinken all use the same adjectives to describe U.S. support, invoking almost on cue what I call the three U’s. The U’s being unwavering, unequivocal and unconditional, and the one I, which is ironclad. Do you see any serious erosion of the U.S. position?
Richard: More than in the past, but not enough. Nowhere near enough. For example, when occasionally Betty McCollum usually is the Congresswoman from Minnesota who does this. She’s a Democrat. She’ll put forward a resolution which they’ll call maybe No Way To Treat A Child, and it says the U.S. will not give Israel any more weapons as long as they are abusing children, and the only people who ever sign onto that resolution are a hundred percent Democrats, no Republicans, and of the Democrats, it’s gotten a little bit better, but I would say 80% were people of color until recently. A couple more Caucasians have joined that. But it’s nowhere near enough. 30 out of 435 house members. And almost nobody in the Senate. Bernie, a little bit Elizabeth Warren, but that’s about it.
David: AIPAC, American Israel Public Affairs Committee. You were a member. What was that like? And does the lobby still have big influence in Washington? Recently, AIPAC helped defeat House Representatives Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, both of whom were critics of Israel.
Richard: AIPAC, I would get their literature every week usually, and after about being a member for a year and I had had my transformation, they called me up. I spoke with a woman who was a graduate student, and I said, You know what? I can’t support AIPAC anymore unless they decide to make peace and they stop promoting violence against the Palestinians. And she goes, Well, AIPAC only does what the Israeli government tells them to do. And I’ve heard that many times since. So AIPAC, in my opinion, is an arm of a foreign government. They should not be allowed to be a lobbyist group in the United States and donations to AIPAC, and AIPAC is extremely wealthy, should not be tax deductible.
They have so much influence in Congress. There are approximately two AIPAC lobbyists for every member of Congress. When a person gets elected to Congress, one of the first things is that person meets with an AIPAC member. So, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, and obviously Rashida Tlaib and a few others have probably told these AIPAC members, “Go to hell.” But they’re so rare, and AIPAC has so much money as proven with the defeat of Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, and Andy Levin. Andy Levin came from one of the most esteemed families in Michigan. He was a very popular congressman. He was, I think, president of a synagogue and the head of a Jewish organization. He was a Zionist, but he was a kind-hearted Zionist who recognized what Israel was doing was wrong, inhumane. But they defeated him. They spent millions of dollars on the campaign and got rid of Andy Levin.
But AIPAC, through the state of Israel, through AIPAC and other means has such influence in the United States that I don’t know if it’s possible in any reasonable timeframe to somehow stop that influence from its horrible effects. For example, Intel now calls itself as much an Israeli company as an American company. Israel has infiltrated Google, Microsoft, all the high-tech companies. They have, I guess, access to their core coding. They just have a lot of influence. They’re influential in banks and also throughout universities as we’re seeing, because a lot of the donors are Jewish and the donors are saying, “You have to stop these nonviolent protests,” by a lot of Jewish kids who know that what Israel is doing is not only inhumane, but illegal, and they’re kicking out college presidents. They’re even trying to get rid of professors who speak out against what Israel is doing.
David: But you see younger Jewish Americans being more critical?
Richard: Much more. Jewish Americans under the age of 40, a majority do not accept what Israel is doing. They’re critical of Israel.
David: Do you see Israel on its current path in danger of becoming isolated and a pariah state?
Richard: I do, and I see it possibly even in danger of civil war. As of two months ago, according to a number of media sources, including Israeli sources, 550,000 Jews have left Israel. At least 80% have said they will not return. Hundreds of businesses have closed. Many businesses are going bankrupt, and the concentration of the religious fanatics in Israel is much higher today than it was 11 months ago, and that continues to happen because not that many Jews are going to want to move to Israel because they’re worried for their safety. But the religious Jews who think that it’s their holy land and they need to be there, they’re the ones who are going to move there, and so that population will keep expanding, and of course they have a much higher birth rate than the non-Orthodox Jews in Israel. Who knows? I think it’ll be longer. Ilan Pappé and a number of people think that Israel is going to implode. If they do, I think it’ll take a lot longer than Ilan and some of the others are predicting it will take.
Norway, Ireland and Spain in late May recognized Palestine. The General Assembly votes in the UN on admitting Palestine are literally laughable. The votes are like 160 to 10, 170 to 8. Those small numbers being the U.S., Israel and some “powerful” Pacific Island nations.
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Richard: Marshall Islands. Palau. Nauru.
David: What do you see happening there internationally with more and more countries like Colombia, like Brazil speaking out against what Israel is doing to the Palestinians?
Richard: It’s good, but unless the United States gets involved, I don’t think that any of these countries will really be able to get Israel tochangeits behavior. TheUnitedStates, whichthey could have done years ago, has to demand that Israel stop, end all illegal activity, end all violations of international law, but that would mean ending the occupation, and Israel wants the land. They’re not occupying the Palestinian people for security reasons. If they really wanted security, they would’ve accepted numerous peace plans beginning in 1948; but they would’ve at least accepted the Arab peace initiative that has been on the table since 200. It would provide security guarantees for every state in the region. It would provide Israel with diplomatic relations with every one of the 57 Muslim nations on earth, and would create a peace on the 1967 border, but that’s negotiable.
Even the former head of Mossad, said, “Look, if Israel would give the Palestinians 97% of the West Bank, allow a nominal number between 20 and 30,000 Palestinians to return to Israel proper, and give Palestinians their civil rights, they could make peace.”
But Israel wants the land. They’ve been willing to sacrifice Jews in favor of the land. They’ve always been willing to sacrifice Jews. They’ve always wanted the land. They originally wanted a Greater Israel, which was Syria, most of Lebanon, Jordan, Transjordan at the time, and all of Palestine. That was their goal. And Russia and the United States in the 1950s, when Ben-Gurion started talking about this, almost kicked Israel out of the United Nations. But then Ben-Gurion modified his language.
David: How would you characterize media coverage of Gaza and Palestine?
Richard: In the United States, it’s been really horrible. I tend to watch MSNBC, which is probably the more liberal of the mainstream media, and I could not believe what I was seeing. It turned into an Israeli hasbara, propaganda machine.
David: Hasbara being Hebrew for propaganda?
Richard: Right. First of all, they didn’t explain context. All they talked about was the terrorist attack by Hamas. They didn’t explain the conditions, the historical factors that led Hamas to this attack. Also, they only had on pretty much Israeli spokespeople and Israeli citizens, and they would say things like, “Well, with all due respect to animals, the Palestinians are animals.” And they would call them terrorists. They wouldn’t even acknowledge that Israel has done a hundred times more to Palestinians what Palestinians did on October 7th.
For example, I tend to have the TV on in the morning, and Joe Scarborough was on for hours. Joe Scarborough has probably never read a single book on Israel-Palestine. He would go on these 10-minute rants, these diatribes against Hamas without having any idea what he was talking about, without any historical context, and this is getting out there to millions of people.
I’ll give you one other example. David Brooks is a well-known journalist for the New York Times. A number of months ago, probably in November or December, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled “The Missed Chance for Peace.” He was lamenting the peace that Israel and the Palestinians could have. He talked about the generous offer that Ehud Barak made at the Camp David Summit in the year 2000 and how the Palestinians rejected it. It was all bogus. Everything he said was Israeli hasbara. Even Israel’s chief negotiator at that summit, Shlomo Ben-Ami admitted that if he were Palestinian, he would rejected it as well.
Anyway,DavidBrookswritesthisarticle. It wasn’t fact-checked at all. I was up at three in the morning. I saw the article come out. Within a half hour, I went to the comment section and there were already 1300 comments for this one article. Most of them were positive, thanking David for clarifying the issue for them. I wrote two comments showing how ignorant the man was. I wasn’t vulgar in my language, but they didn’t print one of the comments. But this is an example. The New York Times has a tremendous influence.
David: Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post is also on PBS with Brooks. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who is on CNN as well. They haven’t said a word about Israel banningall foreignjournalists fromGaza. Thereare Jazeera reporters who live there, who are stuck there, who have been getting news and information out. To her credit, Christiane Amanpour has been one of the few-who have brought this up.
Richard: I agree. By the way, Israel is not just banning journalists. Israel is murdering journalists. It’s killed a lot of journalists in Gaza because they don’t want them reporting. In Israel itself, the news doesn’t contain a lot of information about what is happening.
David: Shireen Abu Akleh, the well-known Palestinian journalist was murdered by the Israeli military. An American citizen, she was a role model for younger Palestinian and Arab women journalists. To date, there’s been no accountability for whoever murdered her.
Richard: Can I just mention, if you look at Israel’s history, murderingpeopledoesnotpreventsoldiersorcommanders from being promoted. For example, Rafael Eitan. Rafael Eitan is the longest-serving chief of staff in the history of Israel. He was very right-wing. In 1956 when he was a colonel. In the Sinai Campaign, he ordered his soldiers to murder 150 Egyptian POWs, which they did. What happened to him? He eventually became chief of staff. He was the chief of staff when Israel allowed the Phalangists in Lebanon to go into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut and slaughter old men, women and children. The reason there weren’t young men there is because all the militants had already left and gone to Tunisia. And there was a truce. Israel had a truce with the Palestiniansand the Lebanese,which they broke when they allowed the Phalangists to go into the camps.
David: Talk about two young Americans. In February, Aaron Bushnell, a twenty-five-year-old Air Force serviceman immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington. His last words were, “Free Palestine.” And then in early September, Aysenur Eygi, a 26-year-old Turkish American woman, was shot and killed by the Israeli military while at a peaceful protest in the village of Beita near Nablus in the occupied West Bank. Her death reminded some of another young American woman, peace activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003. Again, there’s been no accountability for that.
Richard: Not only has there been no accountability, the Israeli court exonerated the bulldozer driver, even though he saw her and deliberately drove over her. And then when the Corries sued the state of Israel, the judge threw their lawsuit out also. And the reasoning was she was not an Israeli soldier, therefore she’s an enemy combatant. That was basically the reason why the bulldozer driver was exonerated.
David: A handful of U.S. government workers have resigned in protest of Washington’s support of Israel and its Gaza war. Why haven’t there been more resignations and protests? What’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank is happening in broad daylight, in plain sight.
Richard: There are a couple reasons. Number one is Israel’s narrative has been around for decades, generations. It has infiltrated the minds of most of Americans, whereas the Arab, what the Israelis call Arab, because they don’t refer to Palestinians as Palestinians. They don’t want to acknowledge their identity, so they lump them into one category.
With 9/11, for example, and ISIS and Al-Qaeda, the Arabs have really gotten a very, very bad reputation, and some of it is deserved, but the fact is a much lower percentage of Muslims support terrorism than Jews or Christians. The Gallup organization did a poll, and they found out that Christians and Jews support, in certain situations, terrorist acts at about double the rate of Muslims. But what is there? There’s almost 2 billion Muslims in the world, so it only takes 1% to have, what, 200,000 terrorists.
My point is that the Israeli narrative has infiltrated society to such an extent for so long that a lot of people simply take things for granted. When you hear Biden or Joe Scarborough or a lot of people talk about the Israelis and the Palestinians, they just automatically talk about Palestinians like they’re terrorists, like it’s just common knowledge, like that’s who they are. They have never studied the history. They haven’t had the decency to study the history and find out what really is going on.
David: What’s happening mostly under the radar in the occupied West Bank? Since October 7th, there are close to 700 Palestinian dead, many more wounded and thousands in prisons where, according to a documented B’Tselem report, there is torture. Incidentally, the BBC recently had a report on Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
Richard: It’s horrible, horrible what they’re doing. Ben-Gvir has the torture sessions from the worst of the prisons. live streamed video to his house so he can watch. They ordered the prisons to virtually starve them to death, to dehydrate them to death, to keep them chained 24 hours a day, no sunlight. They’re committing psychological and physical torture to these people. A lot of the prisoners have had their shackles so tight, and the Israeli guards wouldn’t remove them, that they’ve had to have limbs amputated. This is their revenge. Israel is seeking vengeance. They want vengeance on the Palestinians for what they did on October 7th, for what the Amalekites did on October 7th, so they think it’s justified.
I’ll give you an example of how psychotic this view is. And I’m not anti-Israeli, and I’m not pro-Palestinian. I’m pro-human rights and anti-oppression. But to give you an example, there was a book written a number of years ago by two Orthodox rabbis called The King’s Torah. It was very popular in Israel. But when some of the secular organizations in Israel got angry at what it said, they were defended by a whole lot of other rabbis. What it said was that there’s a term in Judaism called yetzer hara, which is the evil inclination, and yetzer hatov which is the good inclination, and all human beings are born with yetzer hara and yetzer hatov. So according to The King’s Torah, it is an act of compassion to kill Palestinian infants because they will grow up to be terrorists. And by killing them, you are ridding them of their yetzer hara, their evil inclination. This is how twisted some of these people have gotten, and these people are getting to be the mainstream of Israeli society. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich basically represent these people.
And I just want to point out, one of the reasons Netanyahu, not that he wants to, but Netanyahu cannot go along with a ceasefire if he wants to remain prime minister. Netanyahu’s ideology is very similar to Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. It’s just that they’re religious, and Netanyahu is not. But Netanyahu basically agrees with everything they want to do, which is expel through murder or population transfer the indigenous people, and they would prefer murder. They would prefer murder because a dead Palestinian cannot commit a crime like was committed on October 7th.
David: The U.S.is animperial power. It has militarybases all over the Middle East. Washington is in bed with autocrats like Sisi in Egypt, monarchs in Jordan, emirs and sheikhs in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. How does Israel figure in U.S. military calculations in the region?
Richard: If the United States has an ironclad commitment to Israel to make sure that Israel maintains its existence and is able to defend itself against foreign invaders, the United States is always going to make sure that its best friend in the Middle East is able to maintain hegemony in the region. And that’s one of the reasons why the United States is so antagonistic to Iran. The United States could speak more with Iran. George Bush ignored the president of Iran who was willing to make a treaty with the United States. The Iranians were willing to create a nuclear-free Middle East. Of course, a nuclear-free Middle East means that Israel would have to give up its weapons because Israel is the only nuclear power in the Middle East. But my point is that the Iranians are willing to engage with Israel and with the Americans. Ehud Barak, the former defense minister, former prime minister said, “They’re not irrational. They’re meshuganas, but they’re not irrational.” Meshugana is the Yiddish word for crazy. So, he considers them crazy, but he admits that they’re not irrational.
David: What steps can be taken to alleviate or to address the roots of the conflict?
Richard: That’s a very interesting question, because normally I would say education is absolutely necessary. We have to educate Americans, and somehow you got to get the education to start teaching Israelis, not just the roots of the problem, but the fact that we all share a common humanity. So, education doesn’t work. There have been probably thousands of studies that show that if you take someone with strongly held beliefs and you show them irrefutable evidence that their beliefs are wrong, they embrace their beliefs more tenaciously. It doesn’t affect them at all. The two things that I think should be taught in school, but again, Israel would rebel against this because the parents wouldn’t want to go for it, are nonviolent communication, the work of Marshall Rosenberg, and the work of Byron Katie. Those things teach people to be responsible for their feelings, that no one else is responsible for their fear. No one else is responsible for their anger.
And in Byron Katie’s case in particular, they teach projection. They teach how you are seeing the world as a projection. What you claim is true of someone else is often true of yourself. And these spiritual practices, because that’s what they really are when you really get into them need to change the consciousness of our society, otherwise we’re going to destroy ourselves. Even leaving Israel aside, we’re going to destroy ourselves if we don’t learn to live together and learn to take responsibility for our beliefs and images and learn that, yes, you’re a Jew, you’re a Christian, you’re a Muslim, you’re a Hindu, whatever, but at heart there is no separation, and you are a human being who happens to have been born into a Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Muslim family. We all share a common humanity.
And I just want to mention one other thing I discovered which is that the root of suffering is the attachment to a presumed limited and mortal identity and to the beliefs and images that emanate from and reinforce that presumption. If someoneweretotakethat definitionand apply itto every situation where they see conflict, they would be able to understand what is going on to a far greater degree. And then a corollary to that is that the real enemy is not someone or something outside of us. The real enemy is the unexamined and dualistic mind thatunconsciously projects its suffering onto the other and then blames and scapegoats the other for its suffering. That’s what we’re doing all the time. Yes, some people are more cruel and vicious and dishonest and unconscious than others.
In fact, to a very large extent, the battle between what some people will call pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli is a battle between consciousness and unconsciousness. My friends, myrelatives whostill support Israel andeverybody else I met, they want unconscious. They will not read a book. They want to believe the myths that they were fed. They want to believe the false ideas that they have created in their own minds rather than challenge who they think they are. And the reason they won’t challenge who they think they are is at a deeper level death. They’re challenging their mortality. So, their identity is so extremely tied with Israel that when you criticize Israel, it’s as if you’re criticizing them. If Israel unfair and inhumane, they’re unfair and inhumane, and all that it takes is to just wake up and read a book.
I’ve told my friends, “Why don’t you read a book?” No one has to know you’re reading a book. You can read it in the comfort of your own home. And you can put the book down whenever you feel like it. They won’t do it. They won’t even read my book. Not only will they not read my book, but they know that I’ve studied the subject for thousands of hours, but they think they know more than me even though they haven’t studied it for more than a minute. This is the dilemma. This is not an exaggeration. These people, I’m not just talking about my friends. I’m talking about everybody, practically. And when we talk about Israel and Palestine, yes, the so-called pro-Israel side, they don’tknowwhatthey’re talkingabout.They cling to myths. They refuse to find the history.
I’ve never met anyone who supports Israel who actually has read the history, who really studies the history, other than a couple historians like Benny Morris, who believes that Palestinians are serial killers and psychopaths. It’s like the KKK. They’re willing to admit they hate Jews and Catholics and African-Americans. And by the way, Tamir Pardo,the formerhead ofMossad,hascalled today’sIsraeli government much worse than the KKK. It’s a huge dilemma and an existential threat to the world. The irony is the unexamined and dualistic mind is self-destructive in nature. It will create being dualistic. It will create the opposite conditions that it claims it wants. This is why thesespiritual practices are necessary.I knowI’mdeviating a little bit, but it seems like such a simple thing to do, to read the history. But if people associate the truth with the demise, with the death of who they think they are, they’re notgoing to do it.Somehow,we need to interjecta spiritual practice.
David: We’re sitting in a library full of books. Your life was turned around by a book written by Norman Finkelstein called Beyond Chutzpah.
Richard: Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History made a very strong impression on me. That book had excellent and meticulously documented informationabout what is goingon. I recognizedinthefirst paragraph that Norman Finkelstein is a brilliant man. And that kept me reading through stuff that was really hard to take, that was really challenging my belief system. But I could have read books by other authors. I could have read Righteous Victims by Benny Morris, and that would’ve been the catalyst that created the awakening. And I think Norman Finkelstein is a great historian who has kept alive this issue for over 40 years, with Noam Chomsky, to a very large extent just the two of them in the United States.
But my point is that, yes, I reached a point because of criticism from very close friends of mine, because an old, Jewish friend of mine who I spoke to on the phone, who was very low-key, but had studied the history for years, but never really let on where he stood. But I went on a diatribe one day with him right after Hezbollah had captured three Israeli soldiers and killed two. This was in July 2006. And I happenedtoget ararephonecall from my friend, Sammy, who I’ve known from nursery school, and he just told me he was coming out West and was going to visit me, and I said, Thanks, Sammy, and by the way, and I launched into a two-hour diatribe against the Arab world, especially the Palestinians. And Sammy just listened. He hardly said anything. Once in a while, he’d correct me. I knew he had studied the subject. Towards the end of the diatribe, he said, Why don’t you read a couple of books? Why don’t you read a book by Baruch Kimmerling and Tanya Reinhart, two well-respected Israeli professors.
And then I thought to myself, You know what? Maybe there’s something I don’t know. Maybe I don’t know everything. I actually had to have that thought consciously to realize that it was true. And so, then what happened was I compiled a list of books by Jewish authors only, went to the library and picked out these books, and I found this book by Norman Finkelstein who Ihadn’theard about.And so, the point is that because I was distressed by the actions of Hezbollah, and three weeks earlier by the actions of Hamas in capturing Gilad Shalit on the Israel-Gaza border, and because my two close non-Jewish friends who were very wise disagreed with me, I was at an impasse in my life. “Aren’t I the fair and humane person I’ve always thought I am? I’m not bigoted against Palestinians. They’re just a bunch of psychotics. They just want to kill Jews. That’s who they are. It’s not my fault that’s who they are.”
But then I reached a point after talking to Sammy. “Well, maybe there’s something I don’t know.” I realized that I had to do something, and this was not an intellectual decision on my part. It was an emotional and existential decision. I had to turn to the truth. That was the only place I had left to turn to resolve this dilemma. And I turned to, thinking that I was turning to the truth, the historical truth, with a small t. What happened was, as I began reading this stuff, it became about the truth with a capital T, and then what happened was, and I’m not going to go into it would take too long, but it’s in my book, I awakened to my true identity, which is prior to being a Jew, a Christian or an American or anything like that. And I recognized my common humanity with all people. I was as much Palestinian as Israeli, as American, as Chinese. I was as much Muslim or Christian as Jew or Buddhist or whatever. And when that happened, suddenly all the prejudices that I didn’t know existed in my mind were gone, and I could see what was happening. Because existential fear and confusion, and existential fear is always accompanied by confusion because existential fear is the prism through which you see the world. Existential fear and confusion were transmuted into compassion and clarity, and clarity always accompanies compassion, because compassion is the ability to see for 360 degrees.
So, all of a sudden, I knew what was happening, and I knew that I had forfeited my humanity by demonizing the Palestinians all my life without even checking out whether what I believed was true or not, and that’s when I began this thorough study because I realized I had to share this as many people as I could. I couldn’t just hold onto this myself. It wouldn’t make a difference in the world. This was a gift and I had to share the gift, and so that’s when I began my research.
My research was intense. I checked everybody out. Norman Finkelstein said that Alan Dershowitz in his book, The Case forIsrael, didn’t knowwhat hewas talkingabout. I had always liked Dershowitz, so this was another shock to me. So, I studied Alan Dershowitz’s book. I can tell you that for the 244 pages of his book, he cites Benny Morris 87 times, and 59 of those times, he cites Benny Morris from Righteous Victims. He quotes Benny Morris, and then Dershowitz takes his own analysis while he ignores Benny Morris saying how Israel has committed all these massacres in 1948.
And my point is that I studied this to such an extent that I can tell you about all these footnotes.
I want to point one last thing out. This is an example of how deluded a brilliant person can be when they are so attached to their identity. I think it was December, I saw Dershowitz and Cornel West on YouTube. They often do things together. And the YouTube video started out with CornelWestgoing,”Thosechildren,thosechildren,they’re killing all those children,” and Dershowitz is going, “They’re not killing children. They’re not killing children.” And Cornel goes, “They’re killing children.” And Dershowitz is, “Israel doesn’t kill children.” And Cornel goes, “Israel doesn’t kill children?” And Dershowitz goes, “No, Israel never kills children. Never in their history have they targeted a single child. Not once in their history.” Benny Morris’s Righteous Victims, which was Alan Dershowitz’s main source in The Case for Israel, is full of massacres and rapes. Dershowitz has to know that the IDF spokesperson in the late sixties said that “The time has come to confess to our sins. In practically every village we conquered in 1948, we committed massacres and rapes.”
He defined a massacre as the murder of at least 50 people, men, women, and children, and often with lining people up and putting a bullet through the head and throwing them in a ditch. Dershowitz has read this, and here he is believing and convincing himself that Israel has never targeted a child. There’s so much evidence that Israel has targeted children over the years that it’s unbelievable. But this is what happens with the unexamined and dualistic mind.
David: Given the genocide that we’re all witnessing, why are people so quiet? Are we all good Germans looking away?
Richard: I have said that if this were the 1930s and there was an American German Political Action Committee, they would’ve let Adolf Hitler come to Congress and speak, and he probably would’ve gotten 55 standing ovations. A lot of people are numb. They’re confused. They don’t know who to believe. They don’t know who to believe because the Israeli narrative, as I said, has been propagated for so long in this country, and at the same time that seeing Arabs as villains has been disseminated throughout the mass consciousness. It’s a huge dilemma and it’s an existential threat to the world. As I say, existential fear and confusion is the main disposition of human beings.
But the irony is that the unexamined and dualistic mind is self-destructive in nature. It will create being dualistic. It will create the opposite condition to which it claims it wants. This is why these spiritual practices are necessary. It doesn’t have to be Byron Katie and nonviolent communication. There are many other wonderful spiritual practices from religions, mostly from the East. People need toembraceaspiritual practiceandstart learningabout their own minds.
David: Thanks very much for your time.
Richard: Thank you, David.
Q & A
Gentlemen, if you could compare what it was like growing up in households where the annihilation of your relatives was being whispered about or discussed openly. This is something you both have in common. I wonder how that experience has informed your lives and the work that you do.
Forer: For me, I was fascinated with the documentaries that I would see of the Holocaust, of the concentration camp survivors, of those emaciated people. I just found that gruesome, but also fascinating. My parents didn’t really talk about the Holocaust much. My grandparents did a little, but they had escaped the Holocaust. They had come over before the Holocaust. As I said, my friend’s parents had been in the Holocaust. They had the brands on their arm, but mostly the Holocaust was in the back of their minds, and part of the reason for that was because of the existence of Israel. Israel may face another Holocaust if the Arab countries have their way. That was part of the thinking. And then of course we experienced anti-Semitism growing up in the fifties, and even some in the sixties.
Where I grew up, Jews were not allowed to join any of the country clubs. They had to have their own country club. When I was growing up in the fifties, before school prayer was outlawed, they would celebrate Christmas and Easter in my school, but they never celebrated Passover and Hanukkah. I felt that that was kind of a slight to the Jewish people. It made me think that there was an insensitivity towards them. I was aware of the Nazis, of Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, Himmler. I was aware that they were monsters and that they wanted to erase the Jewish people, and I knew that there were a lot of people like them still in the world, but I didn’t dwell on it that much. Maybe if I’d been brought up in an orthodox household of Eastern European first-generation parents, that probably would’ve been different.
Barsamian: The Armenian genocide carried out by the Turks cast a huge shadow over my life. It informed everything I did, my interest in history and politics, why things happened. My parents were not very well-educated. They could never really answer the questions I had for them, so I wanted to know. I wanted to understand what happened in the past, fearing that it might happen in the present. And so that led me into the path of what I’m doing right now: exploring, documenting, investigating, and most of all being aligned with the oppressed, not with the oppressors. As Albert Camus said, “In a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”
(Due to time constraints some portions of the interview were not included in the national broadcast. Those portions are included in this transcript.)
Outro music – Kronos Quartet with Hamza El Din: “Water Wheel.”
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