Genocide Blog 61- YouTube Videos that can Help understand the Genocide
10.01.2025
Some young people, disgusted with mainstream reporting on the Palestinian struggle, have asked me for guidance on keeping up with the genocide that Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinians, and the resistance to it. “What can we watch on YouTube?” they ask. It is not easy for me to give short guidelines, simply because I began following the issue so long ago. That was during the Arab-Israeli 1967 war, known as the Six-Day War, which brought the Israeli occupation to spread into the whole of Palestine, outside the 1948 supposed “partitioned” half of Palestine called “Israel”. I am 76 now, and I was only 19 then, a student at Witwatersrand University, and in the thick of debates about Zionism in the intellectual circles of Johannesburg. Come 1969, people who had ignored the issue got to know about it when a young Palestinian woman Leila Khaled became a heroine by hi-jacking a commercial flight, and then doing the impossible and hi-jacking another commercial flight a year later in 1970! Youngsters all over the world had posters of her on their bedroom walls. Today, you are hardly allowed to mention her name! Such is the political censorship. So thoroughly are even two well-known hi-jacking events hidden!
Here in Mauritius, even a women’s organization like the Muvman Liberasyon Fam took a stand against the first Camp David Accords, as early as 1978. It was in an anthology of such positions published by the now Director of Defimedia group, Ehsan Khodabux. Today his media group is not a good example of coverage of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians, I am sad to say. Anyway, these Accords that his anthology was opposing were important because they started the “normalization” of Arab States’ relations with Israel. Before the Accords, there was unanimous refusal in the Arab world to recognize Israel. The Accords, under the impulse of US President Jimmy Carter, who has just died aged 100, meant that Egypt recognized the state of Israel, and a long process ensued. This “normalization” process culminated in the “Abraham Accords” of 2020, this time masterminded by former and future US President Donald Trump by which the UAE and Bahrain recognized Israel, and which Saudi Arabia was set in due course to join. “Normalization” means “Forget about Palestinians! Ally with Israel, instead!” This “normalizing” process finally blew up when Hamas and the other Palestinian fighters in Gaza broke out of the Israeli fencing keeping them inside Gaza, and literally over-ran the Israeli military, knocking out its bases along the high-tech “iron wall of defense” on 7 October 2023. The effect was to say, “Remember Palestine! Oppose Israel’s Crimes!” Palestine was back on the world agenda.
But, how do people catch up? What are the facts? What is it that is happening in this part of the Middle East, or West Asia?
Here is a short list of Anglophone analysts of all political backgrounds that you can tune in to on YouTube -- not listed in any order. They come from very different standpoints, and very few are in a similar political current to LALIT’s (ours is the current of working class struggle based anti-imperialism), but all those on the list, including the ex-military men, speak with profound knowledge of the past and of what is happening today. They are chosen because they stick to the facts. Though not of the same political currents, they all have a sensitivity that contrasts sharply with the neo-conservatives and other mainstream war-mongers of the past 25 or so years in the West. Their analyses contrast with most of the cold-hearted, pro-imperialist, mostly mendacious Western politicians and Western journalists we are usually exposed to. The analysts on the list are anti-war (seeing war as the last resort of politics and diplomacy), anti-imperialist (meaning anti-empires), suspicious of identity politics and theocracies, and in favour of free speech. They range, however, from conservatives to centrists and then to the left, and so-called extreme left. Knowing the facts is their forté. And when talking about the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, we must bear in mind that as many as 222 Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israel in the past 15 months, and outside journalists are totally banned by Israel from Gaza and increasingly from Israel and even the West Bank. Even Al Jazeera has now been banned by Israel and more recently by the Palestinian Authority Israeli stooges from the West Bank as well. This means our access to daily information is limited. The genocide is under censorship, as you would expect. We have to rely on people who go and study the military sites, and even study the posts on which Israeli soldiers film themselves conducting genocide. Otherwise, we risk being just brainwashed by the evident lies put out systematically by the USA, British and French mainstream media. All this to put emphasis on the need for each of us to seek out alternative sources – and listening closely, carefully studying whether they are people who rely on the truth as the bedrock of their analyses. In LALIT, we share Lenin’s persistence in saying that “facts are stubborn things”. We need the facts – political, social, historic, psychological and military – or else we don’t know what’s going on.
I am somewhat vaguely classifying these analysts by what I think is their primary expertise:
JOURNALISTS/WRITERS
Max Blumenthall
Mouin Rabbani
Nora Barrows-Friedman
Ali Abunimah
Helena Cobban
Antony Loewenstein
Gideon Levy
HISTORIANS
Ilan Pappé
Rashid Khalidi
Avi Shlaim
Lee Mordechai – also bears witness on the genocide
POLITICAL Analysts
Alistair Crook (ex Br. Diplomat)
Prof Norman Finkelstein
George Galloway
Ray McGovern (ex-CIA)
Larry Johnson (ex-CIA)
Prof John Mearsheimer (centre-right political scientist)
Craig Murray (ex Br. Diplomat)
Daniel Levy (ex-Israeli negotiator)
Tariq Ali
MILITARY Analysts
Jon Elmer (analyses Hamas and Hezbollah, blow by blow accounts, weekly on Electronic Intifada)
Jacques Baud (ex-colonel in Swiss army, gives talks in French as well as English)
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (former Chief of Staff to US Secretary of State)
Chas. Freeman (ex US diplomat)
ECONOMICS/POLITICS
Prof Richard Wolff
Prof Michael Hudson
Prof Jeffry Sachs
PSYCHO-ANALYTIC POLITICS
Dr Gabor Maté
Lara and Stephen Sheehi
WHERE DO ALL THE ABOVE ANALYSTS APPEAR? ON WHOSE SHOWS?
Judge Andrew Napolitano program
Katey Halper Show
Nima Alkhorshid – Brazilian podcaster
Electronic Intifada – website and online newspaper, includes reports from inside Gaza.
Chris Hedges Report
Owen Jones – interviews people
Double Down News
Danny Haiphong – interviews people
The Grayzone - website and on-line newspaper
Democracy Now! Amy Goodman Show
Al Jazeera – TV station
My suggestion
When you are sitting and “triye bred murung”, say, or folding up your washing off the line, or knitting if you do, or cutting onions, potatoes and carrots for a meal later, or just pottering around in the kitchen, or mopping the floors, listen to one of these experienced people, at the same time. Or just sit still and watch.
And then, as you listen, you, first, understand what the analyst is saying, try to understand “what is their take” on the issue. The second step is to relate this new way of looking at the issue to what you already know. This gets more difficult. It begins to be part of the answer to “what do you think?” The answer is not immediate. The process is: Fer lespri travay! It is important not to turn away from the “military” aspect of the fight against the US-Israeli genocide.
And gradually, this way, we bring together the history, as it moves forward, the politics, the different political movements, the economics, the military aspect, the psychological component for the peoples involved. And this in turn all helps you guess what bit you can do that can help bring change for the better. Like, for example, taking a stand as LALIT does in favour of a total embargo of Israel – military and other embargo – and a coalition of military forces relying on a UN General Assembly of the UN to apply it. Find a way to link your organization’s aims on this issue to this aim. For women’s organizations, relate it to the struggle of Palestinian women to survive every day and to join political and social movements. For environmentalists, link it to the need to stop ruining the planet for endless production of arms and stocking of 800 US military bases, and the increasing threat of nuclear war. Remember Israel has between 80 and 200 nuclear weapons, all unlawful under international law. For organizations for children’s rights, link the Israeli siege and occupation with the suffering of the children, whose degree of trauma is profound. There is a new Government. It was elected 60-0 and its elected MPs and its ministers said they would support Palestine and end the genocide. We all need to influence the government to do its part in ending the genocide. Write articles and send to the Press! Organize with friends! Act together with others! Join LALIT! Join SOMALP! (Solidarity Morisyin Ar Lepep Palestinn).
Meanwhile, also please also contact us with other “sources” on YouTube or elsewhere that have helped you understand what is going on, so we can add them to our lists of ways of understanding the genocide and the geo-politics and imperialism that fuels it.
Lindsey Collen
for LALIT.
