 quieter place maybe oh that's that's okay we're going to be talking about gaza about the village in the west bank that's facing imminent demolition and a lot more about Palestine so Mazen could you begin by just telling us of where you are right now and just a little bit about yourself first so my name is Mazen from Palestinian American who lives in the west bank and I teach at Bethlehem University and now I am at the boat called Al Aouda which is a boat that is intended to go to Gaza God willing and we have come from Napoli yesterday after 24-hour ride from Napoli and this is the last leg of this tour before Gaza wow and could you tell us a little bit about yourself as well I know you're based in Bethlehem so just a little bit of background so I am a you know professor in biology and I am also director of a new museum that we founded at Bethlehem University of Palestine Museum of Natural History and Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability and they are institutes intended to strengthen Palestinian resilience resistance or as we call it Samud on the land great so speaking of resilience and resistance and Samud on the land as well as sustainability we at Code Pink we've been following the impending demolition of the Bedouin village and I know that there is an ecological or ecologically built school there I'm wondering and I know also that you have been to this village recently so I'm wondering if you can just tell us a little bit about what's going on there so Khan al-Ahmar is the name of the town there is a community about 200 Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed from the negative area and moved to that area in 1950s after also being denied access to the Jordan Valley so they went up the hills and they live in the hills that are to the east of Jerusalem or between Jerusalem and Jericho and Israel has been building settlements throughout the area of the West Bank as you know over 230 colonies that are built in the West Bank now that house nearly 800,000 Jewish Israelis and they are expanding every day and so the idea is this is part of the same process colonization removal of the native people from their land so they want to remove these communities and this community is very resilient as you pointed out they also are ecologically sensitive they built a school for example from rubber tires and mud and in the 174 children go to the school not only from that community but from around the community surrounding Bedouin communities I saw that you were there recently and I know that there have been a lot of protests there by the community and by activists from both from the area and from around the world could you talk a little bit about what it was like to be there and what you experienced? Yes I was there last week and it is really heartbreaking to see the beautiful community that was you know there for you know 60 years 65 years plus and how you know the potentiality of it being removed Israel just actually bulldozed their street and they erected a barricade just a couple of days ago in preparation for ethnically cleansing the village under pressure from international community and others the Israeli court delayed the eviction by a few weeks I think till 16 August pending getting all the information so to speak from the government the government is moving forward with plans for the demolition and plans for the relocation of the community and they want to put them in basically garbage dump site which is not suitable for living let alone making a living basically these are Bedouins who rely on herding sheep and goats goats and they will not be able to live without access to land that their sheep and goats can live off of. Do you have any hope that the Israeli courts and that the pressure will be successful or yeah what are your thoughts on going forward? I think the only hope for saving Khan Lahmar as any other Palestinian community is if the international community moves and what we are saying now from the international community is very disappointing I mean of course the resistance is very important and the refusal to move is very important but after all we are talking about the fifth strongest army in the world against unarmed civilians so obviously when they choose to move and evict them they will be able to remove them then mean that the locals would accept this and many times they will rebuild we remember the village of Al-Araqib in the Nagav which was demolished 132 times and each time the villagers rebuilt that village so there is an element of local resistance and rebuilding there's the element of the international community international community unfortunately under the current geopolitical structures with the world with the Trump in office Netanyahu in office and also I am sorry to say Abu Mazen in office a Palestinian president whose term has expired and who was not doing a whole lot to protect his people I think we are in for some rough waters as we say here in the Mediterranean So speaking of water you are right now with the cause of freedom flotilla and we're waiting to see if Anne Wright who is I think most of our watchers know at Code Bank she's part of Code Bank and part of the freedom flotilla we're waiting to see if she can join us as well and she's there as well but off somewhere at the moment could you tell us a bit about the freedom flotilla and what you're doing there specifically So the freedom flotilla is this particular freedom flotilla made up of four ships this ship that I'm on is that's called a lauda is this is a engine ship but the other three ships are sailing boat ships and they they intend to sail to Gaza as part of the repeated attempts to highlight the blockade on Gaza and break it now to break this blockade is not easy we know that there were dozens of attempts literally to break the siege in Gaza the blockade and five ships did manage to get through in 2008 and 2009 but since then in the past nine years Israel has basically acted in its pirate capacity hijacking the ships in international water against international norms and standards and international law and and so doing Israel is committing a crime basically crime against humanity by hijacking ships in international water ships that pose no threat to Israeli security ships that are heading to Gaza which Israel claims that they have left Gaza but of course Israel continues to control Gaza from every entry and apply a blockade that is basically a genocidal blockade people are literally dying in Gaza Israel is actually applying poisoning the children of Gaza because the Gaza strip has entitlement to water according to international law but Israel let let snow water into Gaza and so Gaza is relying on the aquifer and the aquifer is being overdrawn and underneath Gaza basically and 97 percent of the aquifer water is not suitable for drinking yet people drink it and it's basically poisoning one million Gaza children today as we speak are being poisoned by drinking unsuitable water thanks to the Israeli blockade and Israeli deprivation of Gaza from of its water of its rightful ownership of water and and of of any means of livelihood it's basically a genocide I had to use this term but it is a slow genocide of the people of Gaza so it's a slow genocide every day from water that isn't fit for drinking sewage and all of the devastation from the blockade and then this past week we are watching massacres and actually we've been watching massacres since March 30th this this past week we are watching massacres by bombs prior to this we're and we're still also watching massacres by sniper could you talk a little bit about this and what it's like for you as a Palestinian living in Bethlehem what the feeling is in Bethlehem and the rest of the West Bank for the people of Gaza and yeah what what your how you think anybody might be able to help yes I mean if we step back and think about it it's logical that colonial powers do this colonization is not unusual in human history and the Israeli colonization is no different than the colonization by Europeans of Australia or North America US Canada other places the colonizers want to create a new reality and they want the land but they don't want the people who come with the land and this is so they choose various methods of containing the people and of squeezing them ethically cleansing them killing them etc and in the case of the Palestinians there are 13 million of us seven and a half million of refugees or displaced people and the others are living in increasingly shrinking ghettos uh bantustans I like to call them people warehouses because they store unwanted people in these warehouses Gaza is for example a large open-air prison or bantustan or a ghetto or a warehouse and so is by the way Bethlehem and the other places increasingly becoming like that although Gaza is an advanced stage of ban bantustanization if you want uh but it's coming to Bethlehem Israel is building walls around Bethlehem and eventually Bethlehem and Ramallah and all these other islands if you want will become like Gaza where unwanted Palestinians are stored um with limited access except for occasional humanitarian aid which uh comes from the Europeans etc goes through Israeli hands and Israel deducts from it whatever they want to so basically pirating uh humanitarian aid that is coming for uh maintaining the uh prisoners if you want so you know the only difference between a prison and let's say Gaza is that in a prison you're forced you're obligated to actually feed the prisoners in this case the prisoners are not being fed by the prison guards they are basically being fed by occasional humanitarian aid that comes from abroad with the permission of the Israeli authorities if you want and I hear that uh as you said before that Israel is now blocking uh more and more of that humanitarian aid I saw on sunday that two teenagers were uh killed by by a bomb in Gaza dropped by Israel and I have been reading from Netanyahu that this is in response to flaming kites could you give your thoughts on the disproportionality well uh Israel uh since I came back from the United States in 2008 Israel has continued to attack Gaza with three main peaks that happened in 2008 2012 2014 were and now of course so that's a fourth you know wave of the Israeli attack on Gaza Israel uses these attacks as basically weapons testing facility feed you know laboratory basically they test Israeli new weapons every two to four years on Gaza like shooting ducks in a barrel basically it's very simple um and Israel I mean there are plenty of videos that demonstrate that these people in Gaza are not posing any threat to Israeli soldiers or anybody that Israel is shooting them in the back sometimes shooting paramedics like 21 year old Roseanne Najjar who was tending to injured people was shot uh even killing you know press people journalists uh children as young as 11 and 12 years old shot in the back so clearly that's what they do with people demonstrating near the borders but then occasionally also Israel drops bombs on Gaza as they did this past Saturday and they continued started this past Saturday and I continued in the last few days and Saturday for example they dropped the bombs on the uh on basically an open park killing two children 15 and 16 years old who were just playing there they were just simply at the wrong place at the wrong time and so and then it's heartbreaking to watch see the picture of these two lifelong buddies who their last post on Facebook was a picture of themselves selfie basically with the heart between them saying you know friends for life and they were just butchered for obviously just simply as I said it's uh Israel wants a land they don't want the people who come with the land so the Palestinians are dehumanized and of course Israel can use any excuse that they want to kill Palestinians just like the European colonizers in the United States used many excuses to kill natives and even hunt them and give rewards for people who killed them so uh as you're there on the Gaza freedom flotilla and if folks are wondering why Mazan's image has been moving back and forth a little bit it's because he's on the boat on the water what would you advise us all of us who care so much about what's happening in Gaza and in the West Bank and throughout Palestine do you have any suggestions for what we can do well uh we this movement for free Palestine is a global movement the Palestinian struggle is not the local struggle it impacts everybody after all especially in the US where our tax money and I say our because I'm also a US citizen our tax money is going to fund this killing this massacre of Palestinians and ethnic cleansing Palestinians from their land it is our responsibility as human beings first of all to each other because we should not be thinking as Palestinians we should be thinking as or as Americans for that matter we should be thinking as people as human beings there is one race which is a human race and I think we need to think like that just like we affected change in South Africa via boycott the vestment sanctions via working on the media working on our politicians there are many things that people can do locally as the old saying goes think globally and act locally so we encourage people to act locally in every sphere of their life because this is ultimately a joint struggle for human rights for dignity and it it basically is a choice that we have as human beings between going down the path of endless wars which designers want us to continue down and that's why they pushed for a war in Iraq and on Syria and other places between wars basically and between having peace and human rights that serves everybody whether they are Jewish Christian Muslim or whoever we Palestinians have lived together by the way my own family is Palestinian Christian family but my grandfather's best friend in school was Jewish and so we have lived together in peace and harmony we welcomed also refugees to Palestine before for example Armenians Circassians Druze people from various countries Ethiopian Christians and also Jews from Russia after Russian pogroms came to Palestine we have no problem with immigrants we do have a problem with colonization and so we call for diversity my background is biology as I told you I believe that but diversity is strength whether in nature in a forest you know different species living together or in human societies diversity of beliefs and and religions and concepts and politics and ethnicities this diversity is a form of strength not a form weakness Zionism wants to eliminate diversity and create a Jewish state in the same way in my humble opinion as the Nazis try to make an Aryan white Christian German speaking state they will fail in this as all other movements to be monolithic will fail I am encouraged by this and encouraged by the fact we have diversity even on this boat we have people from Sweden Norway Palestine Israeli even we have a unit and Shapiro and we have Zohar reggae you know Israelis so we have people of diverse backgrounds on this boat and we and we believe this is the strength this is not a weakness well we at Code Pink are with you in spirit and solidarity and our work as you are on the freedom flotilla the Gaza freedom flotilla to break the blockade and as you travel back to Bethlehem and continue struggling for basic human rights and freedom and equality and I thank you so much for talking with us and we look forward to so again soon from beautiful Palermo with the dock and the ships you can see as a beautiful country we were welcomed by the mayor and we are welcomed by the people of this beautiful city and we hope that all cities welcome us in the same kind of spirit thank you thank you