It has now been over a year since Israel embarked on its genocidal campaign in Gaza. In that time, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed or injured. Furnishing Israel with more than just diplomatic cover, Western governments have kept up a steady supply of military aid and equipment, actively enabling the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians. Our governments’ complicity cannot be ignored or overstated.
At the heart of questions around how and why Britain and the US are continuing to arm Israel lies the international arms trade. Thinking more about how this corrupting, deadly industry operates, and how we might resist it, is vital – something that Palestinians understand only too well: one year ago, Palestinian trade unions reiterated their urgent global call to action, imploring workers across the world to halt the sale of weapons to Israel.
We are joined on the show by Ahmed Alnaouq, Andrew Feinstein and Anna Stavrianakis, to discuss how weapons sales to Israel function as a direct expression of state policy; how the arms industry corrupts our own democratic political processes; and the socio-economic opportunity cost of our governments’ commitment to militarism. We also talk about the direct impact these weapons have had on life in Gaza, long before October 7th 2023; and the work that We Are Not Numbers is doing to give young Palestinians agency through sharing their stories.
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Ahmed Alnaouq is a former Palestinian diplomat who served in the Palestinian Mission to the UK. He is the co-founder of We Are Not Numbers, which empowers Palestinian youth to share their stories globally. Ahmed holds a masters degree in International Journalism from Leeds University, and his work has been featured in media outlets including the Washington Post, the New Arab, and Gulf News.
Andrew Feinstein is the executive director of Shadow World Investigations. Andrew resigned as an African National Congress (ANC) Member of Parliament in South Africa in 2001, in protest at the government’s refusal to investigate corruption in a $10 billion arms deal. His first book, After the Party, reveals the impact of this deal. He also wrote the critically acclaimed book The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, and worked on an award-winning feature documentary, Shadow World.
Anna Stavrianakis is director of research and strategy at Shadow World Investigations, and Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex.
Ahmed, Andrew and Anna are all contributors to the new book, Monstrous Anger of the Guns: How the Global Arms Trade is Ruining the World and What We Can Do About It, which is available now from Pluto Press.
Episode Transcript
Chris Browne:
Ahmed, Andrew and Anna, I’d like to thank you all for joining me here today on the show. It’s a real privilege to be able to speak to you all. Now, we have, I guess, listeners from all around the world, but the majority, I think, are based either here in Britain or in the U.S. So we’re going to be talking about the international arms trade today, I suppose, in particular reference to how it operates within and through these countries, you know, Britain and America. And more specifically, we’re going to be talking about how and why our governments are arming Israel and the impact that this is having, you know, on the ground in Gaza and now, of course, in Lebanon as well. You know, the quantifiable and utterly unquantifiable horror and devastation that we are complicit in. So I guess it might feel at times like we’re talking at sort of two different levels or having two different conversations, but they are obviously deeply interconnected. So maybe we can start off by, you know, thinking about the arms trade as a facet of the military industrial complex. And I don’t know, maybe it’s more helpful to think about military industrial complexes plural because, you know, when we’re talking about the international arms trade, of course, there are differences between, say, you know, the UK and the US or between various EU member states in how the arms trade and national governments interact, you know, structurally and culturally. So it would be great if someone could maybe jump things off by telling us a little bit more about how the international arms trade works and some of these differences in the different national contexts.
Anna Stavrianakis:
I can start if you like. Thanks, Chris. Thanks for the invitation. I think the global arms trade really gets to the heart of the power asymmetries in terms of the global political economy, in terms of global insecurities, and in terms of the dysfunction of global order, or perhaps more accurately, disorder. I think the military industrial complex is a really useful concept for thinking about the relationship between arms capital or the arms industry and the state.
In countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, the arms industry is officially privately owned, but it’s also organically, intimately related with state power. So yes, officially they’re separate, but to all intents and purposes, they work together as one organic whole, and that’s a bit different to other major arms producing countries like Russia and China, where the arms industry is owned by the state.
And so it’s much easier to see that level of political direction, that arms transfers are a direct expression of state power, of state direction. But that doesn’t mean that in the UK, in the US and Western European countries that there isn’t… you might not want to call it political direction because there’s actually no disagreement between the arms industry and the states in which they’re housed.
So I think one of the things that’s really helpful in thinking about the arms trade, is firstly not making too big a separation between the industry and the state. And secondly, that even though there are differences between countries in how they organize the relationship between the state and capital, they are all agreed that military power is central to states’ power.
Andrew Feinstein:
I think I’d add to that by saying the global trade in weapons is the most corrupt of all trades accounting for around 40% of all corruption in world trade. And with that context that Anna has described, it’s really important to understand that this trade effectively funds our political processes in the so-called West, particularly in the USA and Britain, where we have a particular form of neoliberal capitalism.
The US, of course, is the arms behemoth of the world that produces around 40% of all of the weaponry in the world, provides Israel with around 70% of its weaponry. It dwarfs the rest of the world. I mean, the next five weapons producers barely equal the amount of weaponry produced by the US, and the US political system in which this arms trade is an absolutely integral part, I describe as a system of legalized bribery, because you can see the campaign contributions and you can see how politicians then get onto committees where they vote back contracts worth billions of dollars to the defense companies who’ve supported them politically. In the United Kingdom, it’s actually a system of illegal bribery because, 1. it’s not legal; 2. It’s entirely untransparent. So if you take, for instance, to give an indication of this, the world’s most corrupt commercial transaction, the Al-Yamamah arms deal between the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia, in which £43 billion of weapons were sold, £6 billion of bribes were paid. And yes, the vast majority of them were paid to members of the Saudi royal family. A lot of them went to intermediaries.
And the intermediaries aren’t just these sort of shady arms dealers who we see in Hollywood films, but rather they tend to be people who are incredibly sophisticated at understanding how political power works in the countries involved, one. Two, how to obfuscate the flows of money so that these bribes can be paid and made extremely difficult to detect. And in the case of the Al-Yamamah deal, not only did huge amounts of money go to the Saudi royals, to intermediaries, a fair amount of those bribes came back to the United Kingdom.
So Mark Thatcher, the son of the then prime minister, received a bribe of £12 million. He wasn’t involved in the deal in any way whatsoever. But this was just at the insistence of his mother, the British prime minister. The Tory Party received significant donations. We don’t know the quantum of the donations because what the main intermediary on that deal did is he just distributed parts of these bribes to hundreds of individuals on the understanding that they would then donate that money to the Conservative Party.
And it’s now no different with the Labour Party in Britain. So what the trade effectively does is it not only causes huge destruction and immiseration around the globe and, you know, quite obviously the genocide in Gaza is the key indication of that. But it actually corrupts political processes both in the buying and selling countries. And it’s a monumental waste of taxpayers’ money, in my opinion.
So we are not only effectively at the moment subsidizing the genocide in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, as British taxpayers or American taxpayers, we’re also subsidizing the corruption of our own political systems and the rule of law.
Chris Browne:
Yeah. Thanks, Andrew. I mean, that’s so… I’m really glad you brought in how the corruption of the industry sort of impacts on our own democratic systems and to, I guess, keep it at a theoretical level for just another minute, I mean, you know, in the book, Monstrous Anger of the Guns, which you’re co-editor of along with Rhona Michie and Paul Rogers, I think you write in the introduction how, you know, the highly militarized focus on national security ignores the real threats to our society, you know, threats which cannot be contained by borders.
So I wonder if you could just briefly expand on this. You know, how militarism distorts our understanding of security itself?
Andrew Feinstein:
Well, you know, I’m a great believer that the notion of national security should be replaced by an idea of human security. What are the greatest threats facing us today? Climate catastrophe, quite obviously, is an existential threat to the planet. Global health pandemics, inequality and poverty, which afflict most of the global South, but also the United States and the United Kingdom.
We’re seeing levels of inequality that we’ve never seen before, but we’re actually seeing levels of poverty that we’ve never seen before. In Britain today, we have more billionaires than at any time in our history. But we’re also seeing more families having to use food banks to feed themselves than at any time since the end of the Second World War.
Now, how can those two things live side by side? So these are the sorts of issues that are really threatening day-to-day human security. But we’ve seen in the United Kingdom – and I’m sure we’ll see after the election in the United States – we’ve seen Keir Starmer’s Labour government come into power with a decision to increase defense spending by about £9 billion a year while refusing to provide a winter fuel allowance to amongst the most vulnerable in our community.
While limiting the amount of children you can claim benefits for and it’s limited to two and they won’t scrap that and they’d be able to cover both of those things which are desperately needed in the UK today, three times over by the increase in defense spending. But if you’re going to fund your political process, if you are going to in your own mind, given the national security and geopolitical discourse that exists in the world, if you’re going to do that through a militarist lens, your defense budgets are going to be continually increasing.
And if that is working in your favor politically and I mean that materially as much as anything else, then of course, we’re going to see spiraling defense budgets in countries of the West, and we should also remember, crucially, that this money we spend on defense, which is often incredibly badly spent. So, you know, the United States of America, taxpayers in the US have spent over $2 trillion in the building of the F-35 jet, which is the most expensive weapons system ever built.
The F-35s are being used over Gaza like any old B-52 bomber would be used. So, you know, there’s no point having all of this sophistication. But also a defense inspector general in the US two and a half years ago issued a report that basically said the combat suite, the brains of the F-35, just doesn’t work properly. So we’re also investing this money in nonsense most of the time that is just generating these bribes and this flow of money into our political systems.
And there is an opportunity cost of that because it’s money that’s not being spent on the climate crisis, that isn’t being spent on health, education, benefits, etc., etc.. And you know, where I come from in South Africa, our very young democracy, in 1998, decided to spend $10 billion on weapons; weapons we didn’t need that we’ve barely used until today. Why? Because $350 million of bribes were paid mainly to my own political party, the ANC. But the reality is, at the same time that that was happening, 6 million South Africans were living with HIV or AIDS. And the policy choice to spend $10 billion on weapons and not to provide antiretroviral medication through the public health system, because, in the words of our then president, Thabo Mbeki, we didn’t have the financial capacity to do so, cost the lives of over 360,000 South Africans.
32,000 babies a year were born HIV positive because we didn’t have money for mother to child transmission treatment, but we had money to buy weapons that we’ve never used. That is a very stark example of the sort of socio economic opportunity cost that is a consequence of the militarism that dominates the world today.
Chris Browne:
Yeah. Thanks, Andrew. I mean, it’s I think there’s a figure in the book alongside what you’re talking about the F-35, about how you get these kind of situations where the inefficiencies of it that the arms trade allow, wasn’t there like a bin or something that was sold for, you know, tens of thousands of dollars. And that’s kind of a little aside, but it’s…
Andrew Feinstein:
The Pentagon, it’s notorious, the Pentagon’s never had a full audit in its existence. And as someone who comes from a public finance background, I find that particularly offensive. But the reality is throughout its history, and particularly with the F-35, these defense contractors who wrap themselves in the American flag and talk about themselves as the super patriots, they charged the Pentagon, for instance, in one example, $340 odd for a hammer that they can buy in the hardware store inside the Pentagon itself for about $1.95.
So, you know, they ripping off the state, they ripping off the government. But our politicians and our political processes are very happy to be ripped off because they are ultimate beneficiaries of that taxpayer money that is being inappropriately utilized.
Chris Browne:
Well, let’s talk a little bit about… we’ve mentioned the F-35 there, but obviously, I think, Anna, in your chapter in the book, you write about how the trade in weaponry is never just about the hardware. And I think this is an important point. You know, one might argue that the lack of entire weapons systems or fighter jets being exported, say, from Britain to Israel, is an indication that we maybe don’t have any direct culpability, you know, in providing the means for Israel to carry out this genocide and now its invasion of Lebanon.
But this is kind of a misapprehension of the arms trade, isn’t it, because it encompasses so much more than just complete weapons systems or just the hardware?
Anna Stavrianakis:
Yeah, I think the idea that the UK doesn’t supply that many weapons to Israel and so it’s not really culpable and any suspension would be simply symbolic politics, I think misunderstands the actual scale of – let’s stick with the hardware for a moment – misunderstands the scale of UK arms exports to Israel. 15% of every F-35 made is parts from the UK, so every rear fuselage of an F-35 is made in Samlesbury in the UK at a BAE factory.
And so given the increasingly international character of arms production, it’s a nonsense to say that the UK isn’t that heavily involved when it is providing the integral parts to those planes. In my home town of Brighton, we have a very small factory, the L3Harris factory, that makes the bomb release mechanisms for the F-35. So, no, they’re not making the plane, they’re not making the bomb, but they’re making the widget that allows the plane to drop the bomb.
You tell me that that’s not a significant contribution to the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza. It’s simply unrealistic to say that the UK doesn’t supply that much weaponry to Israel. We also don’t know the true scale of UK arms exports to Israel, partly because the UK government doesn’t track deliveries, which is handy, and also because the type of licenses that they issue are often what are called open licenses, which allow unlimited transfers of equipment.
So we simply don’t know. But your question was actually about the relationship beyond the hardware. And that’s right. The arms trade is about relationships. It’s about the exchanges of military personnel. It’s about the exchanging of ideas and practices. And that’s very much a two-way relationship. What the US and the UK have learned about counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism, a lot of that they’ve learned from the Israelis who do very well on the international arms and so-called defense markets by claiming that, you know, they’re very open about it, that their weapons and their ideas and their doctrines and tactics are “battle tested,” i.e., used to kill Palestinians and to control their everyday life. So the relationship is much more than simply the kit. And I think we can sometimes… the kit is a good way into thinking about the character of those relationships, but we have to put it in that broader context. And the thing that particularly irks me is when governments claim that, well, we can’t possibly stop selling weapons because it’s all about relationships and it’s the relationship that allows us to generate leverage.
How is that working out for you in relation to what is happening in Gaza? Is the very simple question I would put to any British or American policymaker, because I think the only place it leaves them is with the admission that they are politically unwilling to intervene to rein in the Israeli military, because if there was any sort of leverage that came with those arms supplies, the leverage either doesn’t exist because it’s not working or they’re not trying to exercise it.
Neither of those is a particularly good advert. And then I think the final thing I’d say on this is, you know, the UK likes to claim that arms sales to Israel are so minimal that a suspension, a full suspension or an embargo would be meaningless. It would be shallow, it would be gesture politics. Well, aside from the fact that that symbol matters because it would contribute to the delegitimization of Israeli practice and it would be a meaningful symbol of support to the Palestinians.
Aside from that, when the government faces criticism over arms exports to Saudi Arabia and its conduct in the war in Yemen, they say, well, but arms exports to Saudi Arabia are so massive that we can’t possibly countenance suspending them. So they’re either too big to fail or too small to be meaningful. Well, which is it?
Chris Browne:
Yeah, Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was interesting to see, I think it was last month, wasn’t it, how Britain suspended I think about 30 out of, what is it, 350 of these export licenses for Israel, which Netanyahu called “a shameful decision that would embolden Hamas,” you know, which might leave people thinking that the UK government had taken a very bold action here. But yeah, it seems that it’s actually been pretty insignificant and the vast majority have just continued.
Andrew Feinstein:
It’s like everything else this government does. It’s for show and for PR and it has no impact on people’s lives except in this instance, they’re trying to indicate that they think this will make some sort of difference in the conflict. But in fact, it makes absolutely no difference. It’s purely for PR, for public consumption., while Britain remains complicit in the slaughter of innocents on the ground in Gaza and to a lesser extent, the West Bank and Lebanon.
Anna Stavrianakis:
I think there is… I agree with everything that Andrew said. I do think there’s something significant about the fact that the UK government has been forced to concede that there is indeed a clear risk that UK supplied weapons might be used in a violation of the laws of war in Gaza. We’ve not seen that before. So those of us that watch these things carefully are saying, well, you know, at last or too little, too late.
But in terms of government public positioning, it is significant that this is the first time they’ve made that admission. And I think that admission… we have to be really clear that that admission from the government has only come because of sustained mass protest against its position in relation to Gaza and a general election in which a number of new MPs were elected on pro Gaza platforms.
And that protest in the UK is in no small part driven in a response of solidarity to the Palestinian trade union call that has. – this is not the first time it has been articulated by any stretch of the imagination, the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement has long been clear about this, but a year ago that call was renewed to end all military cooperation with Israel, and that has been a significant factor in much of the protest movement.
So I think we have to be really clear about the politics of what is happening here. That the government has been dragged by the public to have to do something. And so the partial suspension, it’s also an indication of how big this struggle is, that this is what it takes. It has taken a year of protest to get this paltry response that is significant in sort of discursive terms, in terms of having to make that admission, but in material terms is actually absurd.
So the government has said that there is a clear risk that UK supplied weapons might be misused against the Palestinians. It has suspended licenses for parts for the F-16 fighter jet. So, yes, there’s a clear risk, yes, we’ll stop parts for one type of combat aircraft. But no, we won’t suspend parts for the F-35 combat aircraft, not because, oh, those parts are definitely… they’re fine; it’s because it’s basically too complicated. Because the F-35 is an international collaboration that is led by the United States, the UK government doesn’t want to upset the Americans and it doesn’t want to jeopardize BAE Systems and other British arms companies’ role in that program. Now, it turns out, through some really dogged reporting from Middle East Eye, that actually the United States – as in neither the Department of Defense nor Lockheed Martin, the main company involved, so leading the F-35 program – Neither of them have a process for tracking where parts for the global 35 pool go. Which, I mean, I invite them to talk to a company like, I don’t know, IKEA? Any company that does international shipping must have – I would have thought it was a basic question of due diligence that you would have some sort of system for accounting for where your stuff goes.
But it turns out that neither the Department of Defense nor Lockheed Martin engage in that sort of tracking. And that’s a really good example of that kind of convenient fiction that I mentioned at the beginning about the arms industry being officially private and the state being officially the public sector, that when it suits them, they work together, and when it suits them, they both pass the buck and pass responsibility to the other and say it’s not their problem.
Andrew Feinstein:
And it’s quite important to bear in mind this is an industry that manufactures weapons of death and murder, and it doesn’t even have these incredibly basic controls. In fact, for many years, Amnesty International suggested that the global trade in arms was less regulated than the global trade in bananas.
Chris Browne:
Yeah, one thing that’s been touched on here is the kind of reputational damage, I guess, the UK Government has perceived for its unwavering support, to have meted out this small concession Anna was talking about. But I mean, as you’ve already pointed out, that the arms trade is not a one way street in terms of, you know, you talked about how Israel likes to say that its weapons systems and its techniques of surveillance and occupation and repression are “battle tested.”
What do you think about the reputational damage that Israel felt was inflicted on October 7th last year? It’s supposed to have this vaunted sort of military apparatus, and yet that was overcome quite quickly.
Andrew Feinstein:
That’s an issue for Netanyahu. Who, and I’m not going to mince my words here, is a corrupt, mendacious fascist, leading the most rightwing government in a country that many would describe as illegitimate. He has only one interest, and that is political power. And he exercises political power because of his own deeply racist and ethnocentric views of Palestinians and Palestine.
And I’m afraid to say that his views remind me of nothing as much as the racist white supremacy that was the cause of the Holocaust, in which my mother lost dozens of her family and of apartheid in South Africa, where I grew up, and the problem for the world – most directly for Palestinians – is that Netanyahu knows because of the massive security breach on 7th October and because of the way in which he has responded to it, that his only hope of staying in power and staying out of jail, by the way, and I would hope that that was both for his myriad corruption offenses, which is why he tried to curtail the power of the Israeli judiciary, to stop himself going to jail, but also the international justice that in any sort of sane world he would face. So the only way this person stays out of jail and stays in political power is to continue this horrendous slaughter. So it’s in that sense that Israel suffered reputational damage, but in a way that has cost the lives of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
And this is the nature of the complete madness of our politics in the world today; that the so-called West has united behind this figure, largely thinking that it is completely unacceptable to be even critical of anything that Israel does. I mean, it’s the most… you know, never in my lifetime, given my family history, given growing up in apartheid South Africa and getting involved in the struggle against that racist system, never in my lifetime did I imagine I would watch a live streamed genocide on my phone every day, and the Western world would not just do nothing about it, it would enable it, would facilitate it, and for the reasons that Anna and I outlined, would profit from it.
Chris Browne:
A last question before perhaps we bring Ahmed in. I mean, I think at the end of September there was another $8.7 billion aid package to Israel from the United States earmarked for military purchases, air defense systems and so on. Is there anything… what would Israel have to do, do you think, for the British government, for the American government to say it had crossed a final line and to withdraw that support, withdraw that funding?
Andrew Feinstein:
Possibly, possibly, if Israel attacked Britain. But I’m not even sure of that. And if it was Germany, the German government, out of its sense of psychotic guilt, would probably say, oh, well, if Israel wants to attack Germany, so be it. I mean, the madness of the moment is inexplicable. What more could Israel do? Israel has plumbed depths of inhumanity, depths of dehumanization that I think most of us thought in 2024 were impossible and unimaginable.
And we must never forget that. You know, when you see and this isn’t the worst of the slaughter, but when you see Israeli kids geed on by their parents stomping on food aid for starving families and celebrating this, when you see Israeli soldiers celebrating their entire destruction not just of a people but of an infrastructure on social media and there are no consequences.
You know, this is I mean, I cannot imagine an historical parallel. It is something unfathomable to the human mind. And I have a number of degrees in clinical psychology. I don’t understand the depths of depravity that both Israel and our own governments have descended into to allow what has been going on for over a year now.
Anna Stavrianakis:
I think the question of what would it take? I think those of us living in Britain and the United States are finally realizing what Palestinians have known for a really long time, which is that they are dehumanized in international policy circles to the point where they, you know, the powers that be literally don’t care about them. So I think the question of “what would it take?” – if we ask that question, thinking about observing what Israel is doing to Palestinians, that’s the wrong way of framing it, because there is nothing that Israel can do to the Palestinians that will make British and American power and elites want to stop the carnage.
So actually, it’s on us. It’s on the populations of the United States and the population of Britain to create a political problem through protest, through direct action, to create political pressure to force our governments to do what they don’t want to do.
Chris Browne:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Anna. Well, I mean, Ahmed, I particularly want to thank you for joining us today, and I appreciate the conversation’s kind of going on in a certain direction until now. But, you know, yeah, the conversation about how the international arms trade functions and how through the continued supply of weapons and military aid to Israel, our governments are complicit is obviously hugely important.
But we should be, I guess, vigilant as onlookers based in the West that we don’t collapse Palestinian lives into being just another statistic, you know, sitting alongside the amounts of money that is spent or the number of bombs that have been, you know, dropped. And it feels really inadequate to use language like, you know, “the human cost.” But obviously it’s imperative to see Palestinians in their full humanity and not, I think there was a quote from the Guardian interview that I saw with you the other day, not to see Palestinians “purely through the lens of violence,” which I think is important. So, you know, with that in mind, and only if this is something that you feel comfortable sharing, but I wonder if you wanted to tell us a little bit about your own story and some of the family members that you personally have have lost in recent months.
Ahmed Alnaouq:
Thank you very much for having me. I started recently avoiding talking and telling stories about my family and loved ones because we have been telling stories, we have been talking about our tragic losses for so many years right now and nothing had changed. Yeah. So I have been working for the past ten years at an organization that’s called We Are Not Numbers, which tells human stories in English for the world to understand, to see.
And unfortunately, we failed to change the course. We failed to stop the genocide. I’ve talked about my father and my mother and my brothers and sisters a hundred times now. Right now I question the value of telling these stories, which is the core of what I do. But since you asked I will have to answer. My story started in 1948.
That’s 76 years ago. It did not start on the 7th October. My story, my personal story started 76 years ago when my father… when my grandmother was giving birth to my father. On that day, Israel killed her father and her uncle on the same day that my my grandmother was giving birth to my father. And they were killed not fighting the Israelis, the militias. No. They were just going to the market to fetch a doctor to my grandmother who was giving birth. And Israel dropped a bomb on that market in 1948, killing 150 Palestinians in Deir al-Balah. They were peaceful. They were just normal people and they were just going to the market to shop and they were killed. A few months before that, Israel ethnically cleansed my family from Jaffa and from Bir al-Saba and made them refugees in the Gaza Strip. So that’s when my story started. And ever since, I talked in my chapter in this book, how our life was determined by the militants, by the army, by the occupation. So we have not only my life, but also my father’s life was determined by the occupation and what happened to him.
And he talked about the Naksa, the war and before then, between the Nakba and the Naksa. So I told also the story of my auntie, who was watching, was watching the Israeli military execute people in the street, that was in the ‘60s and ’70s, just for the fun of it. And my auntie told me that she saw Israeli soldiers shooting at kids, playing, playing in the street, football, just for the fun of it. And they would just compete. Who would shoot these kids and in the head or in the in the arm or in the leg. So what we are seeing right now with the genocide in Gaza, it did not start on the 7th October. It started way before that. And I’m talking about personal experiences, something that my father told me, my grandmother told me and my auntie told me. This is what we have been going through for the past 76 years.
And then I also lost my mother. Indirectly, Israel killed her because they did not allow her to travel to receive a treatment. And in this genocide, while my family was sleeping in their home, Israel bombed my home, killing 21 members of my family. My father, who was 75 years old, who was born in the first Nakba and he was killed on the second Nakba.
I lost my two brothers, my three sisters and all of their children. 14 kids were slaughtered in my home on the 22nd October last year. And after that I lost count of how many relatives I lost every day. Every now and then I would hear about a cousin who was killed here or there. Cousins and their entire families have been wiped out.
So I have no idea how many people, how many loved ones I lost due to the occupation. And because of these bombs that you have been talking about. And I know this, talking about arms trades and bombs and F-16 and F-35 for you is just like theoretical analysis and stuff. But for me, it’s personal. It has killed my family. It has killed my people. It has destroyed my country, has destroyed Gaza and other places as well.
Chris Browne:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, thank you for sharing that. As you say, the history of the genocide did not begin on October 7th. And, you know, I think you describe in your chapter in the book, Gaza as being a place where children are no longer innocent and where they can tell one type of military aircraft from another just by the sound filling the skies. It’s incredibly chilling to read. And of course, you’re right. This is not academic. This is… it must have had a profound impact on you growing up in Gaza in the 1990s, in the 2000s. Yeah. Could you say a little bit more about what life was like for you, for you growing up at that time?
Ahmed Alnaouq:
I only could tell the difference. I only could tell what life is or what life should be, only when I traveled outside of Gaza, because when I was in Gaza, I thought, this is life. I thought it is normal that we hear the bombs every now and then. I thought it’s okay that the tanks could invade my hometown and kill a few children here or there.
I thought it is okay that I am, as a child who was only six years old, could differentiate between the sound of the F-16 or the helicopter or the drone or the gunshots of the different types of weapons. This what our life was since we were kids. Our memories are like shaped of the protest or of funerals of martyrs, of gunshots, of wars, of incursions, of the siege.
Our life was never easy. It has never been easy. Imagine, like most of the people who are about my age, I am 30 years old now, but I am one of the luckiest people ever in Gaza. Like people, like 2.2 million people in Gaza think of me as like the most successful, the luckiest person ever because I managed to travel outside of Gaza and see the outside world.
This is how we call the world in Gaza: “the outside world.” Because Gaza is like, sometimes we call it the center of the universe, because we only know Gaza and sometimes we’ve got like it’s a different world. People think that I am lucky. But no, no one is lucky because when you are from Gaza, you could never leave Gaza anyway.
It’s always stays in your heart. But for us Palestinians in Gaza, like our life was determined by the occupation. It was shaped by the occupation. Politics affect every single person of us and as little as six or seven or eight years old, we know all about politics. Go to Gaza right now and talk to children who are seven or nine or ten years old about political stuff and they would respond to you. Yesterday, you know, I had a very big family before this war. Now I only have two sisters left in Gaza, and they have a children. And yesterday, one of my nieces called me and she said, like, her brothers, who are my nephews, are only seven years old, are the ones who will go to the market and buy the fruit and buy the stuff for the family to survive because their father is missing.
So you’re talking about kids who are seven years old who have to do all the house chores, the buying, selling the stuff, bringing the water, the clean water and the dirty water for clothes. And it’s unbelievable how kids were forced to live this life like adults at a very, very young age. Go and watch the videos from Gaza right now. When I said kids are not innocent anymore, kids should be innocent. But in Gaza, they were forced to carry all the burdens of the world at a very, very, very young age. At that time they should be just playing and enjoying life. And that’s why I meant to write this introduction in my chapter, because I only understood what the children and what the childhood should be only when it came to the UK.
When I watch children here, it’s very different. It’s very, very different life. It’s very different. Our children don’t have the luxury of going and playing football in the streets every day. And of course sometimes they do. Like I’m not saying that all our children, like before the genocide, we are just having to talk about politics. Of course we played. But the problem is that when a war ends, another one will start and over and over and life is disrupted and it’s not normal anymore. And all of our kids right now, all of our children were born in Gaza after the blockade in Gaza was imposed on us. And it’s true that the past 17 years they witnessed many wars, many aggressions, many incursions, many war crimes, many horrors, many terrible experiences.
And these horrid experiences have left a trauma in their hearts that they could never heal from.
Chris Browne:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think on the We Are Not Numbers website, you know, you write that “to survive, grow and resist in Gaza, we need more than the typical aid.” And I wonder what you would say about, you know, how We Are Not Numbers aims to meet that need? Because as you say there is this trauma that, I mean, if that can ever heal I don’t know, but your kind of work is about providing something that is more than what’s needed for mere survival, I suppose.
Ahmed Alnaouq:
You know, the problem with the international community is that whenever there is a war in Gaza and if the war ends, they would go and like bring some humanitarian aid to Gaza, some food and water. But unfortunately, we have been living under occupation for the past 76 years and no one tries to solve the political problem. Our problem in Gaza is not mere like humanitarian aid.
Go and bring food and water to Gaza. I’m sick and tired of people who think of us as beggars, as people who just want to get money and aid and food and water. We want more than that. We want a political change. We want a resolution. We want peaceful resolution. We want to live in peace and dignity and freedom.
And unfortunately, the humanitarian aid doesn’t bring that to the Palestinian people. So that’s why we, the Palestinians, are sick and tired of that. We’re sick and tired of being viewed by the world as people who just need aid. We need more than that. And then We Are Not Numbers, like my organization is meant to do something different, which is telling the world the stories from Gaza, because we often, Palestinians are often, described in the media as less than humans. We are often demonized and dehumanized, our stories are not brought to the Western media in any way. So what we are trying to do is that we are trying to equip the Palestinians to train them how to write their stories and then share their stories with the world.
And this way I think we are helping the Palestinians express themselves, write their own stories, but also are helping the outside world – yeah, again – to understand what’s really happening in Gaza, because if we depend mainly on the mainstream media in the West, I think the West will never know the real costs of the occupation and the wars in Gaza because the media is complicit in this war against the Palestinians, against all the wars, against the Palestinians.
So we are trying to bring an alternative. And this alternative, I mean, the least we can do, and the only thing unfortunately, we can do is just write our stories and to train our young writers, the youth from Gaza, to write their stories in a language that the world understands, which is English. Unfortunately, it’s English. Sorry, guys.
Andrew Feinstein:
That’s true.
Chris Browne:
Yeah. I mean, I’d actually like just to touch on something else, which I read, I think it was on your biography on the same website, it says that you’re also the co-founder of Border Gone, you know, a media project that tells the stories from Gaza in Hebrew. So I wonder if you could speak a little bit about why you think that is important as well, as well as sharing these stories in English?
Ahmed Alnaouq:
Yeah, because, you know, when I started that it was 2019 and I thought, okay, the Israeli public are misinformed by their media. And they were the victims of the misinformation and disinformation that is spread in the Israeli community from their government and from their media. So I thought maybe let’s create an alternative. Let’s write them stories from Gaza to let them understand the impact of the occupation and the siege on the people in Gaza. And we started writing the stories, me and a couple of friends, in Hebrew, so that the Israelis understand the truth.
And I thought that I am doing something noble. It’s something amazing, that we are trying to bridge the differences and all of that. And I regret that to be honest. I regret it. And I stopped working for this publication, although I still believe it’s good, but I don’t know how to say it, but after my family was killed, I thought, there is no use anymore. You know, because when I was there, when I was still writing in Hebrew, I received messages from people who identified themselves as the Israeli army, and they said they will come after me and kill my family.
That was in 2020 and 2021. That’s after I wrote the stories about my mother who died of cancer because the Israelis did not allow her to travel. So I thought, if I write to you, then you come and kill my family, I don’t want to write you anymore, because I still have some family left. I don’t want them to die. So I stopped writing and I stopped this project altogether.
Anna Stavrianakis:
Chris, might I add a reflection off the back of what Ahmed has just said to us? I think the power of what Ahmed has said is about the politics of how we even understand what’s happening in Gaza. You know, Ahmed has said, I’m sick of being treated like a beggar. We don’t want aid. We want a political solution.
Ahmed has talked about the work that We Are Not Numbers is doing in training Palestinians to tell their stories and understanding the power asymmetry and how people learn about war and violence, that he is training them to speak in English. And I think all of that says something about the character of political debate and whose voices we hear and who we understand to be experts.
You know, even the set up of our conversation today, you’ve opened with me and Andrew as sort of experts in the arms trade. And then we hear from Ahmed to tell us, Ahmed, you said, you know, for you all this might be theoretical; for you, it’s personal. I mean, you know, I think the political shift that we need to make in this country and in the United States is to start taking Palestinian agency seriously and to hear them as political commentators, to hear their voices as political, not just as the human voice about the human cost or to add color to the facts that the experts bring.
You know, the three of us have different forms of expertise. And Andrew and I are trying to flex the muscle of solidarity. But I think, you know what Ahmed… the power of what Ahmed has said, is about the political change that has to happen in order to understand the contributions that, you know, if Palestinian children can tell the difference between different types of foreign aircraft by the sound, they have an expertise that we need to be hearing, that if we listened to them, we would have a much more clear-eyed understanding of how Western power operates. And by that I include Israeli power as an extension of Western power there.
Chris Browne:
Thanks Anna. Yeah, that was a really important point to make. Yeah. I want to thank you, all three of you again for taking the time. And I really appreciate you.
Anna Stavrianakis:
Thanks, Chris. Thanks for the invitation.
Ahmed Alnaouq:
Thank you very much.