 Hello, hello, hello, and welcome. I'm Meryl Kelele. We are DM25, a radical political movement for Europe. And this is another live discussion with our coordinating team, featuring subversive ideas you won't hear anywhere else. And today we'll be returning once again to the unfolding tragedy in Gaza and looking at our leader's reaction to it. Let's recap. On October 7th, Hamas launched a surprise attack from the Gaza Strip on communities and military bases in southern Israel. They killed about 1,400 Israelis and took at least 200 hostages. Israel's response so far has been to unleash its military might against the people of Gaza, launching continual airstrikes against civilians, including those attempting to flee, depriving 2.5 million innocent people of water, food, energy, and medicine, attempting to displace by force over a million Palestinians from their homes with no guarantee of return. And today, as Israel's onslaught goes on, the death toll from Gaza stands at 5,800 people, almost half of them children. More than 800 of those children are still missing under the rubble and a ground invasion by Israel, which could kill many more and ignite a wider war has not even begun. Now, these facts alone are heartbreaking and outrageous. Nothing can ever justify the deliberate slaughter of innocent people, neither Israeli nor Palestinian. But the Israeli government isn't acting alone here. This, the most far-right government in Israel's history controlling one of the most powerful and advanced militaries on earth is striking Gaza with the full backing of key Western leaders. Leaders like unelected European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, who offered her unqualified support to Israel with not a word about respects for the rights of Palestinians. Like Francis Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Olaf Scholz, who have banned pro-Palestine protests in their countries, like Georgia Maloney in Italy and Rishi Sunak in the UK, who are falling over themselves to support Israel's right to self-defense. Yet, on the streets, in European capitals and across the world, millions have come out to protest against the Israeli government's actions, including many Jewish and Israeli voices in some of the largest demonstrations since the Iraq War. And social media has seen a vigorous, if at times, unhealthy debate on the topic. So what's going on? Are Europe's governments at odds with their people over what's happening in Gaza? What's really behind these cowardly moves of our leaders? Is their support genuine? Is it good politics or is it something else? And what can all of us, watching the horrors in Gaza unfold on our screens, do about it? Our panel, including our own Yanis Varoufakis and our crew of activists, leaders and thinkers from across Europe will be weighing in on this topic. And you, you out there, if you've got thoughts, comments, rants, anything you want to say, please put them in the YouTube chat and we'll put them to our panel. And before we start, I just want to say that we've got a petition going, calling for the resignation of Ursula van der Leyen, which is on fire at the moment. Somebody will have to tell me what the current counter is, but it was many tens of thousands last time we looked. And if you would like to sign that petition, you can simply go to dm25.org slash Ursula, U-R-S-U-L-A, and you'll find a link to the petition to add your voice. Thank you. Let's kick it off with Yanis. Florez yours. Thank you, Maren. I'm going to concentrate on us Europeans. I did that on the 8th of October, the day after the Hamas pogrom against Israelis, Israeli non-combatants. I was being interviewed in Berlin over something completely different and I was asked to comment. I was clear that the journalist who asked me the question was expecting me to do the usual European thing. The holier than thou routine of Europeans. And that includes all of us. This is a totally self-critical, you know, a European criticizing himself and other fellow Europeans as Europeans. So the expectation was that I was going to do one more time the usual routine of we are Europeans. We are civilized. We look down upon you scoundrels in the Middle East, you know, human animals that can be Palestinian, terrorists or Israeli killers who are taking the form of settlers in the West Bank or special forces of the IDF. And we Europeans are going to condemn all of the violence which is beneath us because we are so morally superior to, you know, Israeli killers and Palestinian killers and all those of this riffraff in the Middle East who are so uncivilized, so uncouth, so beneath us Europeans who, you know, we populate the various television programs and news feeds with our equidistant, sometimes not equidistant, but nevertheless, our condemnation, words of condemnation. I wasn't going to play that role, ladies and gentlemen. I did something completely different. I said, listen, I'm not going to condemn anyone. Not the settlers, not Hamas, not the Israeli army, not the Palestinians. I'm going to condemn us Europeans and Americans because we are the true villains of the peace here. For decades, we've turned a blind eye to what has been happening in the Middle East in the ancient lines of Palestine. We've allowed this massacre to continue. We have so much, so much to be taken to task for. And I'm not going to play this game anymore of distancing myself as a European and condemning the various killing sprees and pogroms that are going on there because I am responsible. We are responsible as Europeans and as Americans. There is no doubt that we Europeans for hundreds of years have been persecuting, killing, downgrading and humiliating Jews from the first diaspora all the way to the Ukrainian Croatian Thessaloniki pogroms to the Holocaust. But we are also the people who made it possible for the offensive to humanity slogan, a people without a land and the land without the people or a land without the people for a people without a land as if the Palestinians were not people. We aided and abetted the ethnic cleansing that started decades and decades and decades ago even before 1948 under the Balfour Declaration of the British with aided and abetted the crime of creating a situation where the aspirations of the Jews, the Israelis in Palestine and the aspirations of the Palestinians became absolutely utterly incompatible. We ended up with two extremist positions that would lead to genocide. Either the Israelis would be ethnically cleansed from Palestine or the Palestinians would be ethnically cleansed. And what have we been doing since 1948? We've been turning a blind eye as Europeans now I'm speaking to the systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians maybe because we have a very terrible and very well-deserved sense of guilt over the centuries of discrimination and pogroms against the Jews. We essentially tried to expunge our substantial guilt for the Holocaust, for the pogroms, for the discrimination of the Jews by allowing the extremists amongst the Israelis ethnically to cleanse the Palestinians. So my message to Europeans who feel guilty, rightly so, we should all feel guilty for the Holocaust. How many Palestinians need to be killed? Moved out of their homes, made refugees. Ethnically cleansed for our sense of guilt for the Holocaust to be cleansed. There can be no answer to this question which is not in itself a war crime. When I hear Europeans like Ursula von der Leyen, who is a disgrace? Mrs. von der Leyen, you are a failed defense minister of the Federal Republic of Germany. You're only there because Angela Merkel wanted to get rid of you. You're only there because you've been appointed. You represent no one. You do not even represent the people of Germany that supposedly elected you as a politician once upon a time and you ended up being a corrupt and incompetent defense minister of that great country. Nobody gave you the right to go to a war zone in Israel and effectively support the notion that to expunge one war crime, we are going to have another war crime. Because when we say, when she says, when European leaders and not just Ursula von der Leyen but every single European leader I've heard that we defend the right of Israel to defend itself. Of course, we defend the right of everyone to defend themselves. But they are not talking about defending themselves. They are talking about carrying out with our complete approval a war crime. Since when is self defense a license to commit a war crime? Since when have we allowed anyone to tear up the Geneva Convention? Just because they feel that what they suffered, the pogrom they suffered, the war crimes they suffered, the deaths that they are mourning gives them the right to set aside the Geneva Convention. The Geneva Convention was created for horrible, horrible, dark moments in human history for war. Every time there's a war, there is at least one side, usually two, maybe more, who think that they were completely and utterly devastated by a horrible, evil enemy. Do you know of any war where one side, especially the losing side, the side that suffered casualties, do not immediately, immediately tell you honestly, honestly, and they fully believe it and they have every reason to believe it, that their adversary is evil, they always do. That's why we created the Geneva Convention, so that when the evil of war takes place and one side feels that the other side are in the wrong, that they are criminals, that they are killers, the Geneva Convention stops us from legitimizing war crimes in response to war crimes. And here you have the President of European Commission, Prime Minister's Presidents, effectively telling the world that international law is only going to be respected when it suits us, when it is consistent with our prejudices, when it is soothing to our conscience, a conscience that should never be sued because we are guilty above all else for the crimes against humanity than when you're having for decades and decades and decades in Gaza, in Palestine, in the West Bank. This total absorption of our media, of our polity, of our politicians, of our leaders on Hamas, who created Hamas? apartheid created Hamas, Netanyahu himself, a war criminal of great stature amongst war criminals. A man who, if there were a kind of home for war criminals, he would be fated by all the other war criminals as a great contributor to that clan, has staked his whole political career on killing off any chance of peace between Israel and Palestine, between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Remember, he became Prime Minister with one promise, he would wreck the Oslo peace process. So when our great and good leaders in Europe say, oh, there should be no violence, there should be a peace process, why don't the Palestinians pursue their legitimate objectives by peaceful means? Well, they tried it. And somebody who is Prime Minister in Israel today and has been Prime Minister for young has succeeded in becoming Prime Minister and has succeeded in becoming popular and being elected again and again and again. And don't forget that Donald Trump was elected. Don't forget that Orban was elected. The fact that he was elected doesn't mean anything. It does not bathe him in a liquid of morality and ethics and ethicality. He made the point of wrecking the peace process. He made the point of turning Hamas into the only functioning group representing Palestinians because together with the United States, together with the European Union, they humiliated the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. In the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority is king and queen, and Hamas is non-existent. How did they reward the Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority who laid down their arms and renounced violence and recognized Israel? They rewarded them with ethnically cleansing them within the West Bank, blowing up their houses, taking their houses, getting rid of Palestinians from the whole chunks of East Jerusalem. More recently, who will forget the remarkable meeting between Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump's son-in-law, Mr. Kushner, who even had the audacity of presenting jointly a U.S.-Israeli peace plan, which was clearly, clearly a plan for eradicating the Palestinians. Netanyahu clearly said, the point here is that Israel will have full control of every square inch of ancient Israel, meaning all the Palestinian lands. When I hear Europeans say, but hang on, Janus, Hamas started it. I look at them and say, what? So everything was going hanky dore up until the 7th of October, when suddenly some crazed Hamas gunmen carried out the pogrom. It was unprovoked. What do you mean it was unprovoked? You have systematic ethnic cleansing, murders, expropriation of land. They built a whole bloody wall, Sharon's wall, the separation, what they call it, Sharon's wall. They built it in such a way as to separate Palestinians' houses, homes, from their olive groves so that they can not go and pick up their olives. And this happened, what? 25 years ago, unprovoked. Do we really want to enter into this game? Who started it first? You know, the Basil Faulty, you started the war, come at the sequence. We know how it started. It started with an Akbar. It started with interventions by European powers, even before the Akbar, to push Palestinians out of land on which they were living for centuries. On the basis of the right of the return of the Israelis, of the Jews. The moment you do that, you start a war. But, ladies and gentlemen, comrades, friends, this is not a war what's going on. I have made the mistake of calling it a war in the past. I've made the mistake of calling Gaza an open air prison. It is not an open air prison. A little warning for my German friends. Do not be shocked. It is a concentration camp. Prison is for prisoners. It is for criminals. It is for people that have been gone through a system of judges, of juries, a legal system, have been accused of something. The two and a half million people of Gaza are not accused of anything. They are men, women, children. Their only crime is to be Palestinian. And by being Palestinian, to be a clear and present danger for extremist Israelis who believe the mantra that that was a land without people. Now, we of the West are answerable for that. I also happen to have an Australian nationality. Well, I'm ashamed of the history of Australia because that was the precise, precise rationale for exterminating the First Nation, the First Australians, the Aborigines. Do you remember what it was called? In Latin, Terra Nullius, an empty earth. When the British, when the Europeans arrived in Australia, they called Australia an empty land, a Terra Nullius, meaning that the people there were not human, therefore legitimizing their extermination. The Zionist expression, a land without the people, for a people without a land is Terra Nullius. It is the beginning of the ideology that arms the hand that kills the people who were not supposed to be there. We Europeans are complicit in this. We persecuted the Jews and in the last few decades, we are trying to expunge this guilt from our hearts by allowing them to exterminate, to persecute, to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. Two wrongs never made one right. And we Europeans are the criminals here. I will not, I insist, like I did in that television interview on the 9th of October, I am not going to condemn the Israelis who are killing Palestinians. They are Palestinians who are killing Israelis. I am condemned each and every one of us Europeans for centuries of persecuting Jews and now turning a blind eye when the most extremist Israelis are persecuting the Palestinians. We need to do whatever it takes to start a peace process, an immediate ceasefire, an immediate exchange of hostages, exchange of hostages. Do you know there are 183 children, Palestinian children held in Israeli prisons? Are these not hostages? I do not justify the hostages held by Hamas or Hamas for holding hostages. But I haven't heard any political leader in Europe lambasting the Israeli authorities for keeping in their prisons scores of children, old people, women, people that had nothing to do with terrorism, but nothing to do with bombs, nothing to do with guns. So let's have an exchange of hostages. Let's have an immediate ceasefire and let's have a peace process under the United Nations, which begins with a very simple declaration. At the end of this process, there will be, and that is the responsibility of the United Nations and the international community to ensure and guarantee there will be no apartheid on the land of Israel. Thank you. Thank you, Yenis. Lucas, Lucas from Browroon, based in Berlin, those of you. Thank you, Madan. Yeah, like you said, I'm based in Berlin. I'm therefore speaking from Germany and the past few weeks have been, I think the most surreal of my life. German media and politicians may be silent about the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, but I can assure you that doesn't mean they haven't been busy. They've been very busy, in fact, doing something else. Using the Hamas attack on Israel as a pretext to unleash all of the racism and Islamophobia that they know they usually better off hiding. Almost immediately after October 7th, pro-Palestine demonstrations were banned, like you mentioned in your intro. The guise for this blatant violation of freedom of expression is combating anti-Semitism. Well, part of the Jewish community tried to stage a protest called Jewish Berliners Against Violence in the Middle East. That protest was banned. A protest called Simply Youth Against Racism was announced. That protest was banned. A Jewish Israeli protestor held up a sign saying stop the genocide in Gaza on a Berlin square. She was arrested. Neukölln, a neighborhood here in Berlin with a large population of Turkish and Arab descent has been turned into a police state. A huge non-stop presence of policing riot gear have been harassing residents, assaulting protesters, pepper spraying journalists, including Jewish ones, and they've arrested children of Arab descent as young as nine years old. Who is this for? Who does this make safer? Meanwhile, Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor who is a social Democrat on paper has basically turned into Donald Trump as far as migration is concerned and called for mass deportations. The media keeps stoking up racist and fee-amongering against Muslims with stories about Hamas fighters hidden among a future wave of refugees. Palestinian voices are being shut down simply for being Palestinian as happened in the Frankfurt Book Fair where Palestinian writer Adonis Shibley had her award ceremony canceled. One journalist for one of Germany's largest newspapers figured that at this point, she might as well just say the quiet part out loud. The other day, she tweeted, Islamophobia may be justified. And you might be thinking that she deleted a post and apologized right away. No, that was three days ago and it's still up. Check it for yourself if you don't believe me. Her name is Fatina Keilani. Antisemitism is a major issue in Europe and in Germany and it's been on the rise. It has no place in any society and it needs to be combated vigorously and TM25 will always stand against it. And we will do well to remember that the fact that ideologically motivated episodes of antisemitism in Germany are far more common among the racist xenophobic far right than among the Arab and Muslim communities. And that the party that represents this racist xenophobic far right is currently polling in second place nationwide. And that far right views are known to be prevalent inside the police, which is exactly the group of people currently terrorizing the residents of Neukölln and in other places as well. A couple of days ago, a hundred Jewish artists, writers and scientists living in Germany wrote the following in a beautiful open letter. As Jews, we reject this pretext for racist violence and express our full solidarity with our Arab, Muslim and especially Palestinian neighbors. We refuse to live in prejudiced fear. Let's listen to them, echo their words and do the same. Thank you, Lukas. Let's move to Judith Mayer also in Berlin. Thor is yours. Thank you. And yes, I agree absolutely, Lukas. It has really shocked me how quickly Germany is moving back into old thought patterns. Dehumanizing not Jews this time. Everyone is pretty much cool with Jews, but Muslims are the new enemy. And I think it's very scary. And the other thing that really scared me this week is how much we are not hearing because there is so much talking about Gaza. So much, you cannot escape it. It's on all news channels all the time, the newspapers anyway. But there are big holes in what we're hearing. So for example, what we're not hearing is a commitment from the Israeli side to do whatever it takes to protect hospitals and keep them running. We can prove they do not have this intention because today the World Health Organization reported that a third of Gaza hospitals, 12 out of 35 Gaza hospitals have sustained too much bomb damage to keep operating or they have run out of fuel for the generators. When looking at health facilities in general, it's two thirds that have stopped working. And Israel is only claiming that one of these that was hit by Palestinian rockets. So for at least 11 out of 35 hospitals, it's Israel at fault for shutting them down in the middle of this conflict. Nobody is commenting about this. Another claim is that, well, Israel claims that it fights Hamas. And if we took them at their word, what we should be seeing and what we are not seeing, nobody of our leaders or our media is pointing out is that if they were fighting Hamas, they would be offering humanitarian assistance to civilians called in the middle. It would be the minimum to do to prevent undecided people taking the side of Hamas. And in fact, we're seeing the opposite. The Israeli government is blocking the border and food deliveries that the Gazans would get on any normal day and that they already paid for. And they even blocking humanitarian assistance by the UN, the Red Cross and other renowned international organizations. Also, if Israel was really serious about fighting Hamas, we would be seeing efforts to arrest the leaders and the financiers that are based in Qatar and Turkey. And as Yannis said, even Netanyahu, some members of the Netanyahu government have been allowing billions in funding to go to Hamas. And neither the foreign nor the Israeli enablers of Hamas are being arrested. Israel is only fighting the food soldiers. For as long as the money doesn't dry up and the war crimes don't stop, Hamas will have no trouble to replenish its gas and food to our soldiers with those who have lost the mother or daughter in this. Also, Israel is claiming that it is on a mission to free the hostages. Well, what would we expect to see in our countries when there's a terrorist group with hostages? We'd see negotiations, we'd see intelligence officers sneaking in, we'd see special forces liberating a building floor by floor. We definitely wouldn't be seeing our air force bombing the condominiums where the terrorists are because they would kill everyone else too. And yet in Gaza, we're seeing no negotiations, no intelligence agents, no special forces, only bombing with the predictable results. The IDF claims to have killed several dozen Hamas fighters, including three subcommandes last night, just last night. Now, I'm not sure how many they mean by several dozen. Let's be nice and assume 60, or I think they would have said something else. They wouldn't have said several dozen, they would have said maybe more than 50 or something if they had killed 60. Let's assume they killed 64 soldiers and three subcommanders, but the total number of people killed last night is 704, including 300 children. So even assuming that they meant 60, the IDF killed five children and seven other civilians for each Hamas foot soldiers that they killed last night. If they had chosen residential buildings to bomb at complete random, they could have hardly gotten the worst result. If you imagine a random residential building in Gaza might contain five children, seven women or elderly people, one Hamas fighter. Well, I think we see the result. And this callousness towards civilian lives even extends to the same Israeli hostages that they're claiming to want to free. Nobody is pointing this out. But for example, in Haaretz, there was one report from an eyewitness in Kibbutz Bayeri which said that on October 9th, two days after the big attack, there were still Hamas fighters with hostages in some of the village's houses. And rather than waiting them out, negotiating or sending in special forces, the witness says that the IDF just started shelling these houses, killing everyone in sight. The Hamas fighters and the hostages. So if some people higher up in the IDF have so much hatred towards Palestinians that they will give the order to destroy houses in Kibbutz Bayeri with Israeli hostages still inside, we cannot expect them to be any kinder to houses with Palestinian children or houses with hostages in Gaza. And this means that Israelis and Palestinians actually have a common cause. For everyone who wants to free these Israeli hostages, they must unite with the Palestinians and demand the court martial of all these dangerous criminals in the IDF whose hatred of Arabs exceeds their love of Israeli and Arab civilians. We must revoke their license to bomb and we must insist they treat this hostage situation like a hostage situation. The EU can help Israel by sending experienced hostage negotiators, but we should not be sending bombs and war equipment which are totally inappropriate to the situation. We should not condone war crimes with the need to defend itself. And above all, any further collaboration with the state of Israel must be contingent on an end to the blockade and end to ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and ceasefire now. Thank you, you did. If you've been putting comments in the chat, just know that it's going at such a rate that we're having a struggling to keep up. But a couple of quick comments. Ipatios says, amid rising conflicts in Russia, Ukraine and well, with Russia, Ukraine between Israel and Hamas and the prospect of a Russia Iran China axis, how vital is the urgent resolution of regional issues before a global crisis becomes inevitable? And linked to this, Dino asks, how can a peace process take place in such a situation? How does it even start? Lastly, someone else asked, what role might China play in such a peace process? So please factor these comments into your responses. Panos, Panos, where are you Panos? You're based in Athens, floor is yours. Go for it. Thank you, Mehrem. And thanks, Judith, for all those illuminating comments about hostages. I mean, it has come to the surface that Israel has a special way of special protocols dealing with hostages, especially members of the armed forces who are taking hostage. The Hannibal Directive basically says that they prefer that they are killed rather than have them as hostages. And that can really shed some light on how they treat the situation with hostages now. I'd like to go back to the European response. We had certain prime ministers visit Tel Aviv right after, from their lion. And basically they're like, we're totally with you, Netanyahu, just trying not to kill so many civilians because we're having a backlash back home. And what Netanyahu replies to this is that this is a war between civilization and barbarism. Hamas is ISIS. This is what he says. And as the world united against ISIS, the world needs to unite against Hamas. So going back to the question that Ipatios raised about the danger of a world erupting into war, this is an added responsibility of the European leadership. I mean, this is not only about the plight of Palestinians. This is not only about the Middle Eastern question. This is now, I mean, if you embolden Israel and you do not take a principle stance and you do not stick to international law, there is a real risk that there will be a wider, a widening of this conflict and a third world war basically. I mean, you have forces from the US, of course, aircraft carriers and also China in the region. And so this is a real danger. It's beyond the Palestinian question and it is the EU's responsibility to act like a responsible player in favor of world peace. Last point I'd like to make is, yeah, now we're witnessing, you know, like Janice said, Gaza is a concentration camp. At the moment they are bombing the concentration camp and we have two, 300 children dying every day. And this of course has caused a huge wave of indignation across the world. And this is the positive news that we should also mention that there's been huge demonstrations in every capital and people will just not take it. A small note again on anti-Semitism, during those demonstrations, you might hear people say that the Jews have been massacring Palestinians for 75 years. You cannot say that. We need to be serious about this. You can say the state of Israel has massacred Palestinians. You cannot talk about the Jews. This is important because in this wave, during this indignation about so many innocent deaths, it is only natural that you will see a rise in anti-Semitism. Within TM25, we do not talk about the German crimes in World War II. We talk about the Nazi crimes in World War II, the crimes of the Nazis and their collaborators. Just keep an eye out for that. Thank you, Panos, and a very valid and important point. Who do we have next? Amir, Amir Qia'i, our policy coordinator. Thor is yours. And before I hand it over to you Amir, incidentally, in relation to what you just said, Panos, I know that many of you here have attended these pro-Palestine protests, including in Germany. So always interested to know your personal accounts of what you're hearing on the ground and how people are acting. Amir, Thor is yours. Yeah, I was at the protest in Amsterdam. It was, we had, I think, about three to four kilometers long of people marching through for a few hours across Amsterdam. We were at the protest outside the International Criminal Court in The Hague with hundreds of people. That's, it's a small space, so you can't fit more. And the public was pouring into this, was, you know, poured into the streets. We, the traffic was stopped. And everywhere you look at, people have come out. The slogans that we hear are for ending the genocide everywhere, for freeing Palestine and so on. I mean, with all these hundreds of protests this past few weeks, there hasn't, you know, you know, one can scour the media and try to look for anything that was possibly anti-semitic and there hasn't been anything because there's the millions that come out and are supporting Palestine, know the truth of the matter and know that this is an issue of justice and returning and restoring peace to the region. So that has been both personally and of course politically good to see as, and that the protests have even engulfed groups that for some time have been on the sidelines. There's been a bit of a discussion within Extension Rebellion here in the Netherlands about what to do. And then they finally occupied the ICC yesterday with their members and of course to the arrest and police intervention and the usual. So what we have seen is that while maybe our governments have been silenced on the genocide the people have not even at risk of detention, arrest, imprisonment, people have come out. And even more surprisingly, European technocrats in Brussels and elsewhere within the EU machine have come out. We've seen hundreds of signatures and open letters going out. Even within the Dutch government there's been a process of condemning in a sense the Dutch response to the genocide and staying silent. So, and that pressure actually changed the government position here that they're now adopting along with Spain and Belgium urging a ceasefire. So we have seen that even people who may not be tied to the area have seen the actual reality that this is effectively a genocide that is taking place right in front of our eyes. And also just bearing in mind, importantly that today is the day that the United Nations was founded 78 years ago. And the Palestinian file has been intertwined with this body. And we're gonna be talking about hundreds of resolutions both United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council. And the level of impunity and the prevention of earlier hostilities has gotten us to this point where Israeli policymakers are unfortunately, the ones that have power are unfortunately looking at this as a unique, and I'm quoting here unique and rare opportunity for the final rehabilitation of the population of Gaza. And this is from the Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy. It's online, people can see it. Who recommend that moving the entire population of Gaza into Egypt. And they've already worked at the cost of this and it's affordable and so on and so forth. So that's the level of inhumanity and unfortunately that we're seeing this regarding the fact that all of this is triggering as both partners set a potential for a regional war and maybe even more than that. I also wanted to quickly touch on one of the questions from the audience, from the members of the public about how can a peace process start? And we are lucky that we have so many good examples in history and especially in the case of South Africa where decades of apartheid was brought to an end. And once that happened and we had our first elections and I remember the long queues when I was younger. Part of the process was the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which began its work in 1996. And over a period of time and the work still continues there were thousands of people who came forward and either as victims talking about what happened or as perpetrators confessing if you like to the truth of what actually happened and what they did and there was also amnesty granted. So this examples of restorative justice and we don't have time to go into it now but there's examples of restorative justice that can be used upon in the case of Israel and Palestine and importantly this can only happen as Janice also mentioned earlier that apartheid had to first be dismantled and we mustn't forget that as long as people are coming out and raising their voices day in and day out putting themselves at risk that's when the pressure can actually have an impact. Thank you. Thank you. Amir, some comments from the chat. Constance says, through all this one fact needs to be kept in mind. Israel was the occupier, Palestinians are the occupied no amount of propaganda could change that. Mike Breen says Zelensky wanted to join Netanyahu in solidarity with their war crimes. What now for the West international rules-based order? He asks, DRS metal says, if Europeans don't want more migrants from West Asia and North Africa then they should help prevent wars and stop being a US vessel. I think perhaps a reference there to Olaf Scholz comments about the war. I think there are a lot of comments about immigration and deporting people. And lastly, Tom Bottle says, imagine the fact that calling for a ceasefire now is labeled repugnant and disgraceful. The world is coming apart. He's referring there to White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who was very much against a ceasefire in the wake of the attacks and use some rather colorful language. David Castro, Portuguese based in Belgium. What's your take? Thanks, Mehran. Well, you know, I've heard a lot already and I just wanted to contribute by adding something smaller to what has already been said potentially, which is that, you know, I could talk about how the people of Gaza are continuously denied basic freedoms about how the mental health needs have risen to record breaking levels with most of the population suffering from PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Could talk about how hospitals are being bombed and in severe risk of closing. Some of them are forever closed due to lack of resources. I could talk about how the blockade is in violation of international law. Like we all know, I could talk about how Israel has always refused the entry of goods on what it calls security grounds. I could talk about how over 90% of children have been tear gassed and had their homes searched or damaged. I could also talk about how the US has vetoed the hundreds of UN resolutions like a mere reference. But what I want to say and what I want to clarify is this. What is going on in Gaza in particular has been Israeli government policy since 1967. It didn't just happen by chance. None of this is accidental. This has been entirely premeditated and very carefully orchestrated. It's been a plan which Sarah Roy calls de-development, which in other words, and just to quote, it's a policy of deliberate, systematic and progressive dismemberment of an indigenous economy by a dominant one where economic and societal potential is not just distorted, but denied. That's the reality. Let's not mince our words here. In the United States and European Union knows all about it. Yet they refuse to join in with international consensus against this horrendous, murderous and ultimately psychotic policy. The plan is clear to ensure Gaza separation from the outside and to deny any possibility for freedom. This is why we all have to come together against what is going on and take to the streets in our countries because we Europeans are complicit in this genocide and we must put an end to it. Thank you for that, David. Eric Edmund, our political director also based in Brussels, thought was yours. Thanks, Mehran. Just a couple of blocks away from David, in fact, can almost see his house. A lot of what I'd like to say has already been covered and I don't want to repeat what others have said much better than I ever could. The one thing that, however, we haven't spoken about and strikes me, it's a topic that we do cover now and again through DM, but I think the situation now in Gaza has made it even more clear than before. And that is that it feels like at some point as societies in the West, we kind of gave up on the hope of being represented by our politicians and our governments. It feels very much like we kind of gave up that hope. We accepted that that's not going to happen. Our governments will not speak for us. They will be representing other interests than our own and that is very much up to ourselves and self-organizing and breaking power down to ever more local levels to try and resist what is being done to us. Basically seeing democracy as a lost war, if you like. I know this sounds a bit over dramatic, but this is very much the feeling I'm getting because nobody is shocked when a politician comes out and let me take it differently. A few years ago, when genocides were being perpetrated against the Uyghurs, against Rohingya, we were fearfully incompetent as Europeans to do something about it, to stop it. But at the very least, we were not projecting the flag of the nation that was perpetrating the genocide onto our government buildings. That is a low bar, but it is a bar. It feels like Europe's crossed some kind of line here and that line of complete and utter, what's the word? I guess it's cynicism. Our governments are not responding to what people want. I felt that here in Brussels when David and I went to our own protest as at the European Commission. There were tens of thousands of people out in the street speaking out against the stance of the European Union on what is going on in Gaza. This full support to Israel, blank check, no questions asked as a genocide is basically being put. Not basically, a genocide by the technical meaning of the term is being perpetrated against Palestinians in Gaza with food, electricity, and water access being cut to 2.5 million people. Let's not mean some words, not throwing this word around lightly, we mean it. It is precisely what is going on in Gaza right now. And somehow we've accepted that, yeah, well, of course, what did you expect Ursula von der Leyen to do? She's in the pocket of the Americans. That's not good enough, guys. We cannot at the same time pretend we live in a democracy and also be okay with this. Something needs to give. And the approach that we've had in recent years, which is that we need to demand justice from those in power essentially splits us between those in power, those who govern and those being governed, kind of neo feudal system where those who have power, even though they're democratically elected, somehow separate to the rest of us. They're not really connected. And the best we can do is not really to replace them and to with people who we actually control as democratic citizens, but the best we can hope for is to somehow influence those who are divinely ordained to govern over the rest of us. That is kind of how we view our power within our societies at this stage. And it's not good enough. We will have situations like what is going on in Gaza on multiple future occasions because the governments that do govern over us who design and implement policy in Europe are indeed not being driven by our own interests. They're not responding to what we want when we go out in the streets and call for a ceasefire. That doesn't matter very much because we're not the power base. The power base is on the other side of the Atlantic. So we can shout and scream all we like. And until we change that, until we really focus on the root of the problem, which is that we no longer control our governments because the kind of people who make up those governments are very deeply entrenched in a political system that doesn't have our best interest at heart. This will keep on happening and it won't just happen to Palestinians. This also gonna happen to our response to the environmental collapse is going to happen to our response to social housing, to the next economic crisis when that comes along as it's want to do and the rest of it. So we really need to get serious about it. I'll leave it there. There's much more that I could say on this topic. I'll focus strongly on it as you can imagine, but I think that there more or less covers it. Well, I've got a question for you on that. I mean, you touched on it. I'd like to explore a bit more the motivations of these European leaders if we can. We've talked about the fear of being labeled anti-Semitic and European guilt. We've talked about, to some extent, the politics of it, but is there anything else behind it? I mean, what do you think might explain this just utter falling over themselves to support the US line and now to double down even in the face of humanitarian catastrophe? What do you think is motivating these people? My cat also feels very strongly on this topic. Apologize if you can hear of it. It's our dinner time. What I would say as a response to that is that ever since the war in Ukraine broke out a couple of years ago, we're seeing a resurgent NATO alliance, a NATO alliance that is rattling the scabbard at the planetary scale and the recipient of that rattling is less so Russia and more so China, Iran. And of course, there's basically this new block that is developing around those three nations, Russia and Iran and China. So there's a general flexing of power that is happening through the NATO alliance. Now, in Europe, we've been at the forefront of this geopolitical shift that has occurred with two pillars of global, I should say, importance in terms of neutrality. This can be Navy nations of Finland and Sweden going back on decades of peacekeeping work as a result of this fantastic political balancing act, which they've been conducting for, for decades in the case of Sweden over a couple of centuries, and joining that NATO alliance further polarizing the situation. So what is happening now in Israel is should also been seen through this lens of these broader geopolitical shifts, which is also why if you look at where the American aircraft carrier is heading, originally it was said to head to the Mediterranean and instead, maybe their GPS isn't working, but they've ended up outside Iran or they're on their way to Iran. Instead, shows that this is about much more than just the Palestinians and the Europeans are, we're not even being played at this stage because to be played suggests that you're offering some kind of resistance. We're pawns in this game. We've become an annex to the American State Department and we're just playing along in this bigger chessboard, which is unfolding before us. And what is going on with the Palestinians, just like Ukrainians essentially are being sacrificed at the altar of the same kind of profit, both financial and geopolitical, the same goes for the Palestinians and we're just along for the ride instead of being a voice for peace that can stand on its own to political, financial and defense legs as Europe should be especially considering our history and our past, but so far, Europe has been heading in the opposite direction. I think the European elections that are coming up are an excellent opportunity to start pushing back against this very, very dangerous trend. Thank you, Eric. I was just gonna say that, please keep everything that Eric is saying in mind the next election that happens near you, some of which we will be running in or parties that we are allied with. Okay, Johannes Fair, also based in Berlin, thought it was yours. Another voice from Germany, short intervention, thank you, madam. I was critiqued these days by one fellow comrade here in Germany and telling me that killing Jews is not fighting for freedom. What I responded to him was, yes, I agree, and you should add to that sentence, killing Palestinians is not fighting terrorism. I think if we would do both, take care and take the responsibility, especially in Germany, where I think we can all agree that if the Holocaust wouldn't have been perpetrated by Nazi Germany back then, the whole history in the Middle East wouldn't have ended up differently. So we have a historic responsibility in Europe, in Germany, but we have it for both the Jews and the Palestinians to be a force for peace in the region and not one-sided. I think unfortunately, the German leaders really have been, yeah, it is grace regarding this. A unit earlier perfectly described, how you could fight terrorism without bombing and committing a genocide in a caged, closely densely populated area and the German foreign minister from the Greens, the party that was once founded and stood for peace, basically admitted that and said, we cannot contain the humanitarian catastrophe as she was meeting with other foreign ministers in Luxembourg this week. And she even called it the squaring of the circle, which is another word for achieving the impossible. So she admitted that this cannot be achieved and still she's not changing course. And there's even voices in Germany, unfortunately I have to say this, that go even further. The youth organization of Angela Merkel's conservative party called for the relocation of the German embassy to Jerusalem and the recognition of Jerusalem as the indivisible capital of Israel. So pouring further oil into the fire and doing something that actually is a Trump policy. So going fully Trump, that's the conservative youth in Germany. I think this is all very irresponsible and of course with Meta 25 in Germany, we're working against that. And Jacqueline earlier asked in the chat, can you still openly talk about Israel committing war crimes in Germany? I think you can, but if you have a certain job like in a public institution, it can get you fired. And I think that's something that we need to also say openly that, yeah, this is unfortunately the case. Last point, there was someone saying there had been huge demonstrations in every capital around the world. Not every, Lukas already described how they were unfortunately so far forbidden in Berlin. But we hope this will change. We recently had an interview with the organization Jewish Voice for Peace for our German YouTube channel. So check that out if you understand German. And this organization works with Palestinian organizations and we're also in touch with them to organize a big demonstration, hopefully that will not be forbidden on the 4th of November at Alexanderplatz. So look out for that if you're in Berlin. And thank you. Thank you for that, Johannes. Some last comments from the chat. Flying Snow says, what about all UN resolutions against Israel which remain unfulfilled and unrecognized without any punishment? Common Goose notes that the Scottish foreign ministers often to take in Palestinian refugees. He or she says, I don't want Palestinians to be displaced, but I thought that that was a good announcement that should be followed by other European countries. And Philip Blair reminds us that silence is complicity when we know what is happening. Some quick breaking news that's just come out as we're talking, that's why it's breaking news. Israel's ambassador to the UN has apparently called on the United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Gutierrez to resign over his comments that Hamas's attacks did not happen in a vacuum. Israel's foreign minister announces they're stopping contact with the UN. So the plot thickens. Yes, I do. I want to close with you, Yanis. So the floor is yours. I have a comment on this breaking news story. Effectively, what Israel is doing, the Israeli government, is blackmailing the United Nations, saying that unless you give us carte blanche to commit war crimes, unless you wipe clean the historical record from the 1940s to the 7th of December, unless you, the United Nations, declare that this was an unprovoked attack, that nothing had happened before that. There was no ethnic cleansing, no apartheid. We shall leave the United Nations. We should sever our links with the United Nations. I think this is a time for the community of the United Nations to expel the state of Israel from the United Nations. Period. Thank you for that, Yanis. Okay. With that, we will need to close. If you like anything that you've heard here today and you've been part of the chat or just following along and watching us and you'd like to get more involved, then there's one address. It's dm25.org slash join. We are going to be running in European elections and other elections. We have got a movement, policy development, plenty of different activist activities on the ground, organizing protest, joining protest. Please join us and you can get stuck in. It'll just take a few seconds to become a member. If you'd like to sign our petition, which is a simple, light way of getting involved with us, then go to dm25.org slash Ursula and call for her resignation for the reasons that we have detailed over the last hour. And with that, I thank our panel. I thank you out there again for your comments and for watching us and join us at the same time, same place.