Kall: so it's a kind of the strange situation - and I wonder about those who are under 18 feel about Hamas as compared to the elders
Hedges: well, I think there is a real split and I think this comes from, and I think you touched on it correctly. It comes from that period before Hamas assumed power, and after because, what did Hamas do when they assumed power? They started acting like Saddam Hussein. They rounded up especially Fatah officials - especially senior security officials and executed them, they took over the Judiciary. They fired all sorts of civil service people.
They unleashed a sort of Taliban like oppression within Gaza, which still remains predominantly a secular culture. And you're right, that after they took power, their popularity or their approval ratings plummeted and I would say that before this invasion - you know, I'm guessing, but 80 or 90% of most Palestinians and Gazans hated Hamas, and longed for return to normalcy. What happens now, I don't know. And I think this was a terrible miscalculation on the part of Israel
Kall: and that's why I say, they pimped them because Israel is literally helping them now because apparently Israel was planning this for a long time, and it was brilliant, the way they did the bombing of the time was on Election Day. Nobody noticed or paid attention to that. I had no idea until just this last week or so, because there are so many complicating factors in this. I've come to believe the Middle East problem is the hardest problem in the world
Hedges: I don't think it is, I think that it has a kind of logic to it - and that the more you tighten the screws on the Palestinians, and if you look back, this really began during the first Gulf War - you've reduced Palestinians to a kind of subsistence level, economically. Most are living on less than two dollars a day. Half of the residents - 1.5 million people in Gaza depend on foreign aid for food. There has been a kind of Africanization of Gaza. Now, the idea behind it, according to the Israelis I think is that when you make daily life so difficult. You are going to blunt extremism.
People are just too preoccupied with trying to survive, to join militant movements. I think unfortunately, that is misguided and I think that history has borne that out - that the more they tighten the screws, the more they empower the radical fringe. And this current debacle in Gaza - you know, with dozens and dozens of civilians dead. There was just a school hit where the UN had given the coordinates to Israeli air force and used it as a kind of sanctuary for people that had to flee from their homes.
This kind of stuff is incredibly counterproductive; it's just breeding the next generation of terrorists. I think it's important to remember the people that lead the Jihadist moments in Gaza - Islamic Jihad, Hamas, or 8, 9, 10-year-old boys usually in 1956, and they witnessed as young children, the Israeli incursion into gossip, and the hundreds of executions that were carried out a Palestinian men, especially in Rafah and Khan Yunus, and it's no accident that most of the leadership of that generation that comes in both in Hamas and Islamic jihad came out of either Rafah or Khan Yunus that there is a long history and when you brutalize and humiliate a people - especially when your fathers, brothers, uncle's, great uncle's are all being killed - you create the next generation of terrorists. And that is precisely what Israel is doing now. This is not just a tragedy for Palestinian children; ultimately it’s a tragedy for Israeli children
Kall: it's hard to picture any kind of ending to the hate and the anger that exists now. I try to think of ways in which something like the truth and reconciliation hearings in South Africa occurred, but it just doesn't seem like even - this is so much worse - so much more horrible
Hedges: well, you know, it's interesting, if you make a list of the prohibitions that were imposed on blacks in apartheid South Africa. You know the various gradations of travel permits - this kind of stuff and you draw a list up of what the draconian sort of impositions that have been thrust on the Palestinians by the Israelis - that list matches point for point with the one difference being that the apartheid regime. Never went in and use attack aircraft and attack helicopters to bomb townships. That's really the only difference and for those of us...
Kall: a big difference though
Hedges: it's a big difference - I think that, you know, I covered the war in Sarajevo, I was in Sarajevo during the war. And we're getting hit with 2000 shells a day, courtesy of Serbs, and these were not mortar rounds, these were 155 howitzers, they were Katyusha rockets, 90 mm tank rounds. When you understand the power of that kind of ordnance, and you hear that for instance, Apaches - Apaches are really designed as flying antitank weapons. I was in the Gulf War - the first Gulf War - I was in the last tank battle of the war with the Republican guard - I was with the first Battalion-first Marines. These missiles have the capacity to literally take out a tank. Now when you're using that kind of ordnance in densely populated areas - remember Gaza is one of the most heavily populated land masses in the world, you are going to create havoc and inevitably civilian casualties
Kall: word is used more than havoc lately is Holocaust
Hedges: well, holocaust - I don't like to go there with that. I don't think that the - I think that one could say there are similarities between Gaza and some of the kind of Nazi ghettos that was set up in Europe before deportation - Loates and Warsaw - okay maybe that's fair, but
Kall: it's all over the blogs
Hedges: well, I wouldn't use it, I wouldn't use it
