 Welcome to CN Live. We're here with Associate Professor Jake Lynch from the University of Sydney, where a student solidarity group meeting entitled Palestine the Case for a Global Intifada was recently banned on the grounds that it may be linked to support for terrorist activities. In response, Professor Lynch wrote a letter to Vice Chancellor Mark Scott discussing his application of the words terrorism and intifada and the presumed assumptions he was making about the student body. Lynch also cited two articles of international law, namely the additional protocols to the Geneva Convention, 1977 to 79, wherein it is written, the presence of non-civilians within a civilian population does not deprive that population of its civilian character. And also the fourth Geneva Convention, which states an occupying power must not move any part of its population into the territory it occupies. So those strongly relate to Palestine. Professor Lynch, would you like to take us through the letter and give us a breakdown of the arguments that you presented to Vice Chancellor Scott? Yes, thanks, Cathy. Well, I think the main concern is that there's no evidence that Mark Scott consulted any expert witnesses, let alone any of the specialist researchers at the University of Sydney itself, about the antecedents and the meanings of these two terms, intifada and terrorism. They're both clearly plural, contested in many ways, but it's certainly true that most of us probably heard the word intifada for the first time in connection with the uprising by Palestinians in the late 1980s, which was conceived and largely carried out through nonviolent means. So to conflate the word intifada with support for violence is to take a particularly jaundiced and one-sided view of the meaning of that word. And it's especially paradoxical when you consider that the leaflet publicizing the meeting juxtaposed the word intifada with a picture of a peaceful demonstration. So if an uprising in the form of a peaceful demonstration is to be the grounds for banning a meeting from taking place in a university supposedly committed to the values of free and open debate, then it's a rather concerning sign. Joan? Jake Lynch, thanks very much for being with us on CN Live. I think you've obviously been watching this conflict for many years now. There's something qualitatively different about this time. I think Israel used to care more, it seemed to me, 10 years ago about the international reaction. One of the reasons for this might be the character of the Israeli government has changed. This is for years this Maya Kahani wing, if you can call it that, these extremists were marginalized in Israeli society. There was a peace movement. There were actually attempts at diplomacy, even if we find out that the Oslo process was a fake, basically it meant nothing. But this group now that is ruling Israel, you knew that when this event took place on October 7th that the reaction was going to be fierce. But are you even surprised by the ferocity of what's happening? And I'm going to ask a couple of questions about where you think it's leading. Well, I think the violence which is being visited on the population of Gaza must, I think, be seen as one continuum with the settler-driven violence against Palestinians all over the West Bank. It's rightly been called a new pulse of impetus in al-Nakbar. And I always correct people, if people refer to al-Nakbar in the imperfect tense, I always say, no, no, it's in the perfect tense because it has been happening and it is still happening and now it's being intensified. Now, yes, the governmental identity of Israel has mutated over the past 20 years. The international community must share responsibility for that because, you see, as long as impunity is extended to Israel and nothing is done about any of Israel's well-documented abuses and violations, that disempowers the voices of restraint within Israel. I mean, people are still going. People I interviewed when I was in journalism, such as people from the parent circle, people from the Refuseniks movement. I interviewed Robbie Damon from the parent circle and Adam All, who was a military Refusenik. You know, they're still there and their advocates of restraint, advocates of compromise and they're surrounded by people who say, well, you know, why are you advocating restraint? No one does anything when we continue to build in the settlements. No one does anything when we continue to force out the Palestinian population of these areas of East Jerusalem. There's no comeback. So your advocacy of restraint must be treacherous. You must be traitors. So we, that is the international community, pull the rug out from under advocates of restraint and compromise within Israel. And that's what empowers the extremists and the advocates of pressing ever further on with the Nakbar and with the ethnic cleansing on with the domination of the whole of historic Palestine. Do you think anybody at your university actually knows what Nakbar is? People wrote that who stopped this event? Well, my unease over the decision to ban this event, I think is certainly bolstered by the fact that it doesn't appear to have be based on any expert witness evidence. And certainly the use of the word terrorism, for example, you know, I was a BBC journalist in the period when the BBC, along with the Reuters news agency, decided to stop using the words terrorist and terrorism, except by attribution, because it's almost impossible to apply them without some degree of selectivity. And the selectivity inevitably puts you on either one side or the other. And certainly, you know, there is a particular definition of terrorism, which seems to be inscribed in the Vice Chancellor's message, which overlooks or ignores the very well-documented connections between Israel's military operations and other, I would say, more authoritative, more widely acceptable definitions of terrorism on the other hand. And there doesn't seem to be any awareness of that in this decision. Yeah, the UN General Assembly has never come up with a common definition of terrorism. There is no definition of terrorism, unfortunately, would be helpful. But the FBI has one in the US. But well, the specific history is there is one which is fairly widely accepted, the only UN one, really, which was commissioned by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime from an expert, AP Schmidt, in 1988. And the crucial point about that is that it allows for terrorism to be committed by either non-state or state actors. Now, that is then repudiated by the Pentagon definition, which was coined in the 2000s, following the attack by a suicide bomber on board a motorboat on the USS Cole in Yemen Harbour in 2006. And so that does specify that terrorism is the province of non-state actors. And it also says that it's an attack on non-combatants. And it goes on to specify that non-combatants should also be military personnel who are not directly engaged on military duties. So in other words, the crew of that warship, the USS Cole, could be said to have been the subject of a terrorist attack, even though it's a military vessel. So that's a very one-sided definition and therefore enjoys much less acceptance among specialists and experts than the original AP Schmidt definition from some time earlier. And if the university in its executive branch is aware of these nuances, then I don't see any awareness of it in the decision to ban that meeting. Don't really want to get too focused on this, but on the issue of non-state actor, a state actor committing the same crime that a non-state actor could be categorized as a war crime, because it was a state that did it, whereas that a non-state actor would have committed terrorism. And I think, for example, when people say the United States or Israel or another government is a terrorist and beyond being a sponsor, state sponsor of terrorism, isn't it enough that they committed a war crime? Does it happen to also be terrorism? Yeah, it's a largely semantic debate. So, for example, during Operation Allied Force NATO's campaign of bombing over Yugoslavia, the Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon was quite explicit that the US was doing things like bombing power stations in order to put pressure on the Serbs to get their leadership to end the campaign. It's a classic example of terrorism, whereby it's a target of opportunity in order to communicate and send a message to a target population. And if it was done by a non-state actor, we wouldn't hesitate to call it such. Right. Now, speaking of war crimes, the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York a couple of weeks ago came out with a legal brief that they wrote in which they argued that Joe Biden and other members of the Biden administration are at risk of being complicit with genocide. So they made it clear that they believed that genocide was happening right now. That's another word, word of definition, but a very specific one in the convention, the genocide convention. There are more and more UN officials who are starting to use that word as well, at least saying like Francesca Albanese, who's the UN special rapporteur on the occupied territories has said that Israeli officials have proven or given a lot of evidence about the intent by the statements they have made going into this conflict. But talk to me about the complicity. I mean, to me as a Western, as an American in particular, it's unbelievable to watch the US government stand by and allow this to happen and facilitate it, giving political cover, diplomatic cover at the UN, and actually two aircraft carriers in the region, giving military cover and supplying the weapons. Plus, there was an American general there in the war room, in the cabinet room. I mean, how could they not see what's going on that a whole world can see plainly? Because this succession of war crimes is being televised live. Yeah. To me, the relationship has seldom been better encapsulated than in the aphorism of Casper Weinberger when he was Secretary of Defense under President Ron Reagan. And he said, Israel is America's unsinkable battleship in the Middle East. Now, if we look back at one of the founding documents of neoconservatism, the Pentagon Memo Defense Planning Guidance, which was leaked to the New York Times in 1992, this is the origin of the project for a new American century. And it identified three regions of the globe, in particular, where America must resist the emergence of a rival regional hegemony. One was Europe. The other was the Far East. And the third was West Asia or the Middle East. And it's in that sense that Israel is the indispensable ally. So it keeps the Arab States divided. It's a pinch point, if you like. This is a point where international law, international humanitarian law, the kind of fund of agreements, which gives rise to agreed definitions of genocide and war crimes is there on the one hand. And here it is meeting on the other hand, what the United States and its allies calls the international rules-based order. And the international rules-based order is distinguished in that it binds but does not protect the powerless. And it protects but does not bind the powerful. And that's how Israel can get away with it. Look, I mean, it's been nearly two years now since the International Criminal Court began its investigation into war crimes in Israel and Palestine since June 2014. There is this line that Kathy quoted at the top of the show in the Ford Geneva Convention, and occupying power must not move any part of its population into the territory it occupies. That is utterly unambiguous. It's one of the clearest items in international humanitarian law. There is no intrinsic reason why the ICC should not have ruled straight away that the entire settlement-building project on Palestinian land is a war crime. And the fact that it didn't has only contributed to Palestinian frustration. And that frustration is what you saw boiling over on October the 7th. Yeah. Well, that investigation began in 2019, the ICC, and they've done absolutely nothing. But I think that we've seen a completely different stage of this conflict. The amount of killing that's gone on now, as far as the past, anything that happened before in Gaza. And the Geneva Convention also requires an occupying power to look after the welfare of the people that they're occupying. And it gives them no legal right to defend themselves. This question of right to self-defense, this mantra that keeps being repeated, that that gives them carte blanche to kill whoever they want to in the pursuit of one Hamas leader in this refugee camp. Jubilee refugee camp, they've hit two days in a row and killed hundreds of people. And we still don't know whether they actually killed them or not. There was no distinction there. And of course, the proportion was the proportionality of that attack, whether it was a military target or not, which they haven't actually clarified yet, even if it were, the amount of people that were killed there. So I think the ignorance that is inherent in this conflict, and it wasn't until I read Ilan Pappes, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, that the actual story of how Israel was created became clear to me. And to many people who've read that book, this whole crop of new historians of which he was a leading one, has revealed, this is not known to the people at your university, I could tell you, from based on that, what you wrote in that letter, that they do not understand the basis of this conflict, how Israel was created. Where did these people come from, the Palestinians? I think they think maybe they emigrated there. I mean, they were there first, obviously, their land was taken. They have been dispossessed. And we could listen to Moshe Dayan in that famous eulogy he gave in 1956. He said, eight years ago, we drove these people off their land, we're living on the, and we're killing the land and living in the houses of their fathers. And they're over there and God's are looking at us. And one day they're going to reach out blood. So don't be surprised if they hate us, because we are settlers and we live by the gun and by the plow. So basically, he's being very clear about what Israel was and how it was created. And this deep ignorance is really at the heart of not only the idiocy of closing down your meeting of France prohibiting speech demonstrations in favor of the Palestinians, Germany, the same thing, or Swallow Bravo in the home secretary back in Britain, who wants to outlaw the Palestinian flag. I mean, talk to me a little bit about the ignorance about this war, how important that is and what will happen to you at your university and in general, the way the public is reacting and Western governments are reacting to this. Yeah, you're talking about ignorance. I mean, knowledge and understanding are dangerous commodities that have to be kept well away from the exercise of power. I mean, there is a consensus among competent authorities that the regime Israel has been running towards the Palestinians is one of apartheid, which is a well defined internationally recognized crime against humanity. And yet the leaders of these governments allied to Washington like Anthony Albanese, the Australian Prime Minister or Kia Stammer, the Labour leader, you know, purport to dismiss this finding that this is a regime of apartheid. That puts them in the precisely analogous position of leaders that used to dismiss climate change. You know, so the consensus of people who know anything about it is that it's apartheid. The reaction of people who deliberately prevent themselves from knowing anything about it is to dismiss the consensus that it's apartheid. I mean, to go back to the case of the Jabali refugee camp, we're back now to the days of the United States Air Force bombing Vietnamese villages in order to save them. So if there is one gun emplacement in a village somewhere down there in the Mekong Delta, it's valid to destroy the entire place in order to save it from falling like a domino to communism. Well, it's the same logic that says we'll destroy the Jabali refugee camp and kill hundreds of people in the search for one possible military installation. Now, following Vietnam, of course, the International Committee of the Red Cross reconvened to adopt these additional protocols as a response to the world recoiling from that intrinsically sociopathic logic of the United States bombardment of these Vietnamese villages. And it adopted this phrase that Kathy quoted at the head of the show that the presence of non-civilians within a civilian population does not deprive that population of its civilian character. So even if there is a gun emplacement in the basement of the hospital, you've got to leave it there, because that's the lesser of two evils. The greater evil is to bomb the place. Now, the additional protocols enjoyed the support of about 160 UN member states. That's about 80% of the international community, not the United States, not Israel, not Sri Lanka either. Interestingly, which of course was responsible for a massive war crime against the Tamil people in 2009. But in the case of Australia and the UK, they should locate a bit of solid material in their backbone and go and tell Israel, no, this is not up to the standard that we apply and we require. And if you keep doing it, there will be consequences. This is always the missing element. There's never a firm boundary. Nothing ever happens to Israel as a result of its violations and infringements. And that is the green light for Israel to keep on moving further and further to the right for the crazies as you put it to take over and to accelerate the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Yeah, well, that's the character that's different about this particular phase of this long conflict of Israel's continually ethnically cleansing Palestinians in that we now have plans that have been leaked. They say it's not been adopted yet. I don't know whether the blue to believe in terms of the Israeli government. But this was the Israeli intelligence ministry that came up with talking points, essentially. And one of them was to drive the population out of Gaza, completely into Sinai. And there was a private think tank that a day before was also leaked there. Very similar plan, which was to drive them into Sinai and put them in these two cities, one being Ramadan City and the other new Cairo without having a huge number of empty apartments that cannot be afforded by the local population. So essentially, they're talking about a forcible transfer, which a clear violation of international humanitarian law and driving the population out of Gaza altogether. Tell me, isn't this something that we've not seen before? To me, maybe this bombing we're seeing of Gaza is a kind of herbal renewal plan, because in order to use the gas, the offshore gas that's been found outside Gaza, to use that money to build luxury hotels, luxury flats, shopping centers to recreate Gaza as part of Israel, populated now by Israelis and not Palestinians. You have to demolish an old city before an urban renewal. They just happen to be demolishing these buildings with the people still in them. Sure. Why not? Yeah. Look, I mean, how far do we need actually to unearth documents that spell out what the plan is when the plan has been crystal clear for the last 75 years? I used to look at the news reporting of Palestine and it spanned the period of the so-called al-Aqsa Interfada when there were suicide bombings and such instance. And the cliche always was that it would interrupt a period of calm. The bombing interrupted a period of calm. Well, that's only because the ongoing tightening and ongoing violence against Palestinians would be happening in drips and tramps and ones and twos for all that period. There never was a period of calm. The news has been tightening over that entire span of all those decades. Now, of course, that the debate was dominated in the early days after the Hamas raid on October the 7th by, should it be condemned? Is it justified? It's not a question of condemning or justifying. I mean, to go back to the pantheon of international humanitarian law in the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it says explicitly that human rights must be protected by law if man, it's a dated and gendered reference, but if human beings are not to be forced to have recourse as a last resort to armed rebellion against tyranny and depression. Now, tyranny and depression is a perfect description of the regime under which Palestinians have been living. Any legal diplomatic and political pathway towards self-determination has been closed off and frustrated. So they are forced to have recourse to armed rebellion as a last resort. And that will continue to be the case for as long as these attempts are being made to ethnically cleanse Palestine and drive them out of their homeland. You know, Ben-Gurion is reckoned to have said that the old shall perish and the young forget, but it doesn't work that way. History's never worked that way. Each time Israel carries out one of these massive attacks on Gaza, they lose a little bit of legitimacy. Like 10 years ago, you would not have heard human rights watch, for example, UN officials openly saying in reports that Israel is an apartheid society, although you did get Ehud Olmert and various other former leaders admitting, I have these quotes here, they have admitted that Israel wasn't apartheid. So if they did not give one man one vote for one state, secular, democratic country in which everyone can vote, that was the definition of apartheid, that they did not give the vote to these people in the West Bank and in Gaza. As this legitimacy is lost each time, are we at a point now where this can get so obviously bad that the United States will have to do something to stop, finally stop the Israelis because I think they're the only ones who could stop them unless there is an intervention. I want to ask you about that too. In the Pol Pot genocide in Cambodia, the Vietnamese, active Vietnam army invaded Cambodia to stop a genocide. It's the only time that I know where this responsibility to protect was actually implemented, where an invasion was done to stop. It was not the way the US created this responsibility to protect because of Bill Clinton's guilt over Rwandan genocide and his hidden agendas there. Why, for example, in Libya, they were trying to overthrow Gaddafi. There was no massacre as a British parliamentary report shows that Benghazi was never under any threat. Gaddafi was not about to commit a massacre. That was a complete and utter lie, but we saw the intervention of Vietnam and Cambodia. Are we watching a possibility of an intervention from first Hezbollah and then maybe Syria and ultimately if the US starts attacking Hezbollah from that aircraft carrier, the involvement of Iran? Where do you see this leading in terms of how peacefully it could stop by the US cutting off funds and telling them to stop? What do you think is going to happen? Yeah, I think in the White House they'll be watching Biden's ratings for handling a foreign policy. And if the Golden Rule is, if any foreign crisis is in the news and appears to be dragging on indeterminately, that damages the president. And of course, the next presidential election is on a knife's edge, especially if Trump manages to get through to the nomination. So the Biden administration will be looking for a way out. You could have mentioned, you know, another one being the Kosovo crisis. They turned to the European Union and the Russians to get them off the hook of that one, because that was Clinton and he was losing support on his handling of foreign policy. You know, there have been odd indications coming out of Netanyahu that he's been telling hardliners, it sounds anomalous, to contrast Netanyahu to hardliners, but even harder liners, should we say, that Israel must, you know, restrain itself to some extent, because that's the instructions of the Biden administration and they're sending us the weapons. It was an interesting vote at the UN the other day that the attention was attracted by the fact that countries allied to the US, including Australia, would not vote for a ceasefire. But at the same time, neither did they vote against the ceasefire. They abstained. Quite a number of EU countries voted in favor of it. Even the deranged Rishi Sunak ministry in Great Britain voted only to abstain and not against it. And indeed, the number of countries that voted with Washington and the Israelis was down to 12, so that they made 14. That's fairly close to the irreducible minimum. You know, the lowest that you get siding with, you know, Washington and Tel Aviv on these kind of occasions is about eight or nine. So 12 is not far above the minimum. And that's a diplomatic warning sign. Remembering that, you know, the United States has got a lot of fingers in a lot of other pies. I mean, when Blinken first started talking about the obligations on democracies to behave differently about a week into the crisis, you know, it's not coincidental that he'd been talking to India. He'd been talking to the Chinese. He'd been talking to the Europeans. He was getting a flavor that the international community will want to see an end to this sooner rather than later. And that might be the restraining factor in the short term. I wonder if this isn't part of the grand huge change that we're seeing in the world, maybe a major historical turning point, which was really focused first on the Ukraine conflict, where the vast majority of humanity and most countries in the South, whether that be South America or Asia or Africa, did not join the sanctions against Russia, did not see this as a crusade to save democracy and to back the United States. And we've seen now trading, not in the dollar, we see China intervening, being a force for diplomacy in the Middle East, getting Iran and Saudi Arabia to reconcile something that no one ever thought could happen in the short term. And the United States certainly did not want to happen because US policy seems to be based on chaos, on division, on crisis, where the Chinese showed that you could make progress there. So the US is losing massively in the world. I think they're only now starting to wake up to this idea that they aren't necessarily the permanent power they thought that they were. And this frightening moment we're in is how will they accept that? Will they accept that they're no longer the major power that they were, the global hegemon that they were, and become part of a multilateral, multipolar world? Where do you see that happen? How is the US going to respond to losing in Ukraine, which they have, and to what's happening now where the world is turning against Israel like never before? Yeah, don't forget, they also had to high-tail it out of Afghanistan, that was the other one. Because of course, the site, the spectacle of Soviet tanks rolling out of Afghanistan in 1989 was one of the triggering events for the fall of communism because it reversed the previous trend of Soviet tanks rolling in to Budapest in 1956 or Prague in 1968. So Afghanistan is a choice arena for some of these considerations. I mean, crisis makes strange bedfellows. So right now, one of the most promising auguries is the contestation within the now Republican majority controlled US Congress over the allocation of submarine building for the AUKUS submarine plan, which is intended to contain and confront China. That is leading directly on a pathway towards a regional war with China. So, you know, good for the Republicans. One of the main sources of hindrance to Israel's completion of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is the backing for Hamas and Hezbollah on the other side from the Iranian regime whose treatment of women is a disgrace to any concept of human rights. So, you know, good for the Iranians. I wouldn't say, you know, that the Iranians and the Republicans would be among my biggest buddies in normal times, but crisis makes strange bedfellows. Some kind of restraint has to be contrived and applied, you know, if we're not going to carry on down this extremely destructive path. Cathy. Thanks, Jake. That's been very enlightening. I just like to close out by showing you and our viewers some of the data collected by Iraq Body Count. And so Iraq Body Count, we already know of this organization from WikiLeaks, Julian Assange extradition hearing Iraq Body Count is so named because it started not only counting the number of civilian casualties, but also giving them names. And they have been doing for the last week, they have been doing the same in Palestine. And so what you can see there is a record number and also an ID number. So these are distinguishable individuals. Now, the reason that they are doing this, and if you look at this slide, this is the end of that list. This is a document that you can download with the whole list. But look at the end of it. This was from the beginning of the bombing of Palestine until October 26. The number gets up to 6,747. Now, the reason that I mentioned this, and this is a little bit later when they started analyzing that data with ages, you can see there that the mortality data. Now, this is supplied by the Gaza Ministry of Health, which we've been told because they're a Hamas run, we can't trust it. But I don't know if it came from the Israeli Ministry of Health, would we trust that. So I just think that that's a reason to not take it seriously. But if you do actually take it seriously, the fact that you've got everybody's ID number and their name and translated into English, they use chat GBT to translate their Arab names into transliterations of their names for English speakers. But if you look at it here, what Iraq body count are seeing that that the number of people killed are overwhelmingly civilians? Yeah, it is extremely shocking. And it's an extremely important project to identify each of the victims individually in the first place, because that gives us something to rely on as a sort of information, you know, a mid claim and counter claim, but also because that's the route to remembering that all these people are actually human beings, i.e. not just numbers, but also names. I think that's very important. Jake Lynch, thank you very much for talking to us. I know you have to go. Thanks. Bye.