Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Christmas marks the birth of Jesus of Nazareth over 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem, Palestine, in what is now the Israeli Occupied West Bank. The occasion is both solemn and celebratory. The Church of the Nativity now stands on the site considered to be Jesus’ birthplace, in an animal stable, where the newborn is believed to have been placed in a feeding trough, or manger, as depicted in creches the world over. “Christ in the Rubble” is the name of one such creche, located a short walk along an ancient stone-paved street from Jesus’ recognized birthplace, inside Bethlehem’s Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church. There, the baby Jesus, swaddled in a Palestinian keffiyeh, rests atop a pile of rubble, depicting Israel’s relentless attack on the people of Gaza. Last year, the pastor of that church, Reverend Isaac Munther, gave a sermon that went viral, called “Christ in the Rubble.” As the bombardment of Gaza nears its 450th day, and with well over 45,000 Palestinians killed there since October, 2023, Munther’s latest Christmas sermon was titled, Christ is Still in the Rubble.

“‘Never again’ should mean never again to all peoples,” Munther said in his sermon. “‘Never again’ has become ‘yet again’ — yet again to supremacy, yet again to racism and yet again to genocide. And sadly, ‘never again’ has become yet again for the weaponization of the Bible and the silence and complicity of the Western church, yet again for the church siding with power, the church siding with the empire.”

The reports from Gaza are grim. Israel continues to attack the besieged enclave’s ailing healthcare system, detonating remote-controlled explosives just outside the Kamal Adwan Hospital and forcing the removal of sick and wounded patients from the Indonesian Hospital. Israel also shelled the Al-Awda Hospital, one of the Gaza Strip’s main obstetric facilities. Jesus’ mother, Mary, was lucky to find a quiet stable in which to give birth. Now in Gaza, babies are delivered with a complete lack of sanitation, clean water, or proper medical care. Most agricultural infrastructure, including stables and mangers, have been systematically leveled in Gaza, in what Oxfam has labeled “the late stages of ethnic cleansing.”

“So, today, after all this, of total destruction, annihilation,” Munther continued, “Gaza is erased — millions have become refugees and homeless, tens of thousands killed. And why is anyone still debating whether this is a genocide or not?”

Expanding on his sermon, Rev. Issac Munther spoke on the Democracy Now! news hour. He said, “We’re still seeing images of children pulled from under the rubble. It’s unthinkable to me that it’s been more than 14 months now into this genocide, and we’re still seeing the same images. It seems like we’re powerless, and it seems that the world is content with letting this go on. And here in the West Bank, as we watch from Bethlehem what’s happening in Ramallah or Hebron, we wonder, 'Are we next?' Israel has made it clear they plan to annex the West Bank next year. What would this mean on the ground?”

He added, “Our fear here in Bethlehem is that there is no one who’s going to hold Israel accountable.”

Israel notoriously ignores international law, with full support, militarily and diplomatically, from the United States. South Africa, joined now by 14 other nations, has a genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice, while the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for crimes against humanity, against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant. Gallant recently made a trip to Washington DC, where he met with high-ranking Biden administration officials, all of whom ignored the arrest warrant.

Netanyahu, however, reportedly won’t attend the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, given that Poland says it will honor its obligations to enforce ICC arrest warrants. Israeli columnist Gideon Levy, wrote this week in the newspaper Haaretz,

“Eighty years ago, Jews were given a choice between two legacies: Never again, the Jews will never face a similar danger, or – Never again, no one in the world will ever face a similar danger. Israel clearly chose the former option, with a fatal addition: After Auschwitz, Jews are permitted to do anything.

Israel has implemented this doctrine in the past year as it never has before.”

In one of only a handful of times in the last century, Christmas this year coincides with the first day of Chanukah, the Jewish Festival of Lights. In that spirit, let there be light. Let there be life. There must be a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, now.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

“Water is Life” became the anthem of the water protectors protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline in and around the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota in 2016. Now, a cruel negative variant of that phrase applies to Gaza: “No water is death.” Two million Palestinians trapped in Gaza have been subjected to an Israeli military assault for close to 14 months, including the purposeful denial of water. On Thursday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a damning, 184-page report on this manufactured water crisis, titled, “Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water.”

The report details how Israel has systematically deprived water to Palestinians in Gaza, and quotes Israeli officials who, in their own words, define this crime as official policy. Former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, for example, said on October 9th, 2023, two days after Hamas’s attack on southern Israel,

“We are imposing a complete siege…No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel – everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and must act accordingly.”

The Israeli military dutifully followed its orders, so much so that, on November 21st of this year, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued arrest warrants for Gallant and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity and war crimes.

“What that statement of his [Gallant] and statements by other senior Israeli leaders in positions of control and command in the Israeli army over this issue of denial of access to water, their statements are evidence of an intent, and they were also carried out by the military and by the authorities,” Bill van Esveld, HRW’s acting Israel and Palestine Associate Director, who helped produce the report, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “It’s not just they said something and it sounds bad. What they said was actually what they did. That’s extremely serious, and that is part of what led us to the conclusion of extermination. That is a crime against humanity, of deliberately causing mass death. One of the ways that can be committed is by depriving people of what they need to stay alive, such as water.”

van Esveld went on to explain HRW’s damning conclusion, accusing Israel of genocide:

“Extermination is the same act as one of the acts of genocide listed in the Genocide Convention and indeed in the International Criminal Court statute on its article on genocide, deliberately inflicting conditions of life on people calculated to bring about the destruction of that group.”

HRW has made this charge only three times previously in its almost 50 year history, as van Esveld explained: “it is not an accusation that we level lightly…We accused the Myanmar military of genocidal acts against the Rohingya in 2017 and we found full blown genocide against the Kurds in Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign in Iraq in the 80s and we found genocide also in Rwanda.”

The report details the many ways that Israel denies water, from its intentional destruction of water infrastructure, holding tanks, pipelines and desalination plants, to actively blocking donated water tanker trucks from entering the Gaza Strip. “The results are horrifying,” van Esveld said. “The lack of water kills you in a million different ways.” Babies die of dehydration, others die after unwashed wounds become infected, all while over a quarter of a million people suffer from skin diseases caused by the inability to bathe.

While HRW’s report focuses specifically on the denial of water, their conclusion mirrors one made more broadly two weeks ago by Amnesty International when it became the first major international human rights organization to accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza.

“It’s a damning indictment of the United States’ failure to stop Israel’s violation,” Budour Hassan, an Amnesty International researcher, said on Democracy Now! when Amnesty’s report was released. “If there is any country that has the capacity, the power and the tool to stop this genocide, it’s the United States. Not only has the United States failed to do so, it has consistently awarded Israel. It has consistently continued to flout the United States’ own laws in order to continue giving Israel the weapons — the very same weapons that are used by Israel to commit the genocide in Gaza.”

Efforts to halt US support for Israeli atrocities in Gaza continue. Palestinian American Ahmed Moor and others recently sued the US State Department and Secretary of State Antony Blinken for failing to enforce the Leahy Law, prohibiting military aid to foreign military units accused of human rights violations. “The basic conditions of life in Gaza aren’t being met,” Moor told Democracy Now!, “[a] policy that our government is supporting.”

The people of Gaza need a permanent ceasefire now, an end to the flow of US arms to Israel, and a massive flow of clean water and humanitarian aid.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.