Palestine, A "stupendous source of strategic power": oil

My Q&A with activist and journalist Dimitri Lascaris

Photo taken from Dimitri Lascaris’ Twitter feed of an image of Shireen Abu Akleh

Since Oct. 7, 2023, very few Canadian journalists have gone to Palestine to report. Aside from some of CBC’s heaviest hitters like Céline Galipeau and Adrienne Arsenault, the number of journalists that have made the trip have been low, especially compared to how many packed their bags for Ukraine in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion.

While there are mostly bad reasons for why Canada isn’t sending many journalists to the Middle East to report (notably that Canadian media tends to follow the line of Global Affairs Canada), there are understandable reasons too: Israel has murdered more journalists in Gaza than any other war certainly since WW2 (and even including WW2? I’d have to really dig into that one, though correspondence from AP from Berlin during the reign of the Third Reich helped tell the West an important, up-close story of the men who perpetrated the Holocaust).

It’s also basically impossible for foreign media to actually get into Gaza. The combination of Israel’s targeted attacks on journalists, the country’s attempt to shut down Al Jazeera and the limited number of people who are still reporting from inside Gaza means that the world relies on very few people to tell the story of what’s happening there.

But Canadian journalist, former Green Party activist and lawyer Dimitri Lascaris decided to go. He caught video of Israel conducting an air strike on Northern Gaza and nabbed an interview with Ammar Al-Moussawi, a senior official with Hezbollah. You can follow Dimitri’s reporting at his website: https://dimitrilascaris.org/

Here is our Q&A:

ML: Where are you visting and why did you decide to go to the West Bank?

DL: So far, I have visited Jenin, Tulkarm and Far’a refugee camps, as well as Jericho, Bethlehem and East Jerusalem (including Sheikh Jarrah). My original goal was to go to Gaza but I have not been able to find a way into Gaza. I’ve come to occupied Palestine because the Western mainstream media are doing an appallingly bad job of reporting on this genocide. Once it became clear that I was not going to get into Gaza, I decided to focus on those areas of the West Bank where there has been the most violence. In the West Bank, Jenin and Tulkarm have suffered the worst destruction and casualties since October 7. What I hope to communicate through my reporting is that this genocide is not confined to Gaza.

NL: What moments have stood out for you so far?

What is happening in the West Bank explodes every myth that Israel has concocted to justify its destruction of Gaza. Hamas does not rule the West Bank, and yet there are settlements everywhere. The settlements have expanded relentlessly for more than fifty years. Israel began building them two decades before Hamas even existed. The ICJ ruled unanimously in 2004 - before Hamas won the Palestinian election of 2006 - that the settlements violate international law. One cannot understand the October 7 attacks by ignoring this history. Israel has systematically destroyed any prospect of an independent Palestinian state. As a result, it was inevitable that there would be an explosion of violence one day. Israel is now exploiting the violence it provoked to justify its genocide against the Palestinian people. If it succeeds in committing that genocide in Gaza, Palestinians living in the West Bank will be next. In fact, Israel is already committing genocide in the West Bank, albeit at a lower level of intensity. Its obvious goal is to cleanse all of historic Palestine of Palestinians, and to seize full, permanent control from the river to the sea.

NL: I know that for me, every time I see something that comes directly from Gaza through a friend, my mind races full of all the ways that Canada has been absolutely terrible in this horrible situation. What kinds of things do you see, being in the West Bank, that Canada could easily do to help keep Palestinians safe?

DL: Without Western government support, Israel could not continue to dominate, dispossess and brutalize the Palestinians. Western governments get away with supporting Israel by means of a false narrative that they have been feeding to their electorates for decades. All that is required to smash that narrative is for one Western government - just one - to tell the truth. By unambiguously acknowledging that Israel is an apartheid state and that its war on Palestinians constitutes a genocide, Canada could effect a sea-change in Western attitudes toward Israel, and initiate a collapse in Western support for its colonial project. The truth can set the Palestinian people free.

DL: I saw you post a video of an Israeli airstrike. What did it feel to witness that so close up?

The airstrike was not what affected me the most at that moment. It was the knowledge that the people upon whom that bomb was dropped are trapped, and that half of them are children. It is one thing to read and watch news about a concentration camp from afar. It is quite another to see a concentration camp with one’s own eyes. From where I stood on “Camel Hill”, the fence and watch towers that ring Gaza were plainly visible. When that bomb struck, I understood that Israel is shooting fish in a barrel, except that the fish are human beings and the shots are U.S.-supplied bombs.

NL: Do you know if any other Canadian journalist has ever captured that on camera?

DL: If it happened, I'm not aware of it. I've never seen a Canadian journalist capture the bombing of Gaza on camera. All that I have seen are the republication by Canadian media of images captured by journalists from other news organizations, such as AP.

NL: How as the trip changed your understanding of Israel's war on Gaza?

DL: I now see the genocide in Gaza as part of a larger, multi-decade genocide perpetrated by the U.S., its allies and its regional proxies against the Indigenous peoples of West Asia. All of this was done to secure Western control of what U.S. military planners described in the aftermath of WWII as a "stupendous source of strategic power": oil.