Talking Sense 13: Giuseppe Picheca on how the world order collapses around Israel

This is English version of this podcast. Dla polskojęzycznych przygotowaliśmy osobną wersję z dubbingiem. On przegada. Rozmowy z ludźmi, którzy wiedzą co mówią. Hello everyone, my name is Tomasz Ryński and I would like to introduce you to my friend Giuseppe Picheca. Giuseppe lives in Prague and he has a background in human rights activism and journalism and although he wanted to mention that today he is here as a private person in capacity because he is currently not working in those fields, he still remains very adamant and provides a lot of useful information and online activists.

W związku z pewnymi obecnymi wydarzeniami i z tego co czytam, on jest strasznym antisemitem. Czy to prawda? Tak, to jest świetna introdukcja. Oczywiście nie jest to prawda, jeśli uważamy znaczenie słowa. If we consider the way in which this world has been politicized in certain sphere of right-wing Western Europe and US, well then yes, we are on the enemy's side of hegemonic power here. Let me explain how anti-Semitic you are, because at the time of recording the Israeli foreign minister, deputy foreign minister, Sharon Haskell, she wrote on Twitter

Missiles rain down on towns and cities where kids should be playing, learning and sleeping safely in their beds. This is terror aimed at the most innocent from the genocidal maniacs. The world must not stay silent. And you are such an antisemitic person that you are outraged also when it's not Iran doing that allegedly to Jewish people, but also when Israel does it to Palestinian people. That's the basis of your... Jak to dziwne, tak? To jest bardzo dziwna pozycja, być w praktyce przeciwko zniszczeniu dzieci bez względu na ich nacjonalność. Ale to jest to, na czym jesteśmy teraz. Ale to jest bardzo pojęte wyjaśnienie tej dziwnej sytuacji, w której jest wojna,

I ja zamieszkam mieszkanie w białym budynku i w moim kontrakcie jest stwierdzone, że jakakolwiek akcja antysemityczna może dać wpływ na dysolucję kontraktu instantanicznie. So if I'm accused to be an antisemite, I can lose my flat. And it could be funny because when I enter in this flat as a long-lasting pacifist with, you know, 20 plus years of pacifism and then an academic degree in peace, an academic degree in human rights, for me, you know, being accused of being racist is as far as the moon. But in these days, if I have a Free Palestine flag in Prague, I might be accused of being such. Co jest oczywiście szaleństwem, ale daje wyjaśnienie tego, w jaki sposób żyjemy w czasach hiszpańskich.

Dla dziennikarzy musimy wspomnieć, że Pani Haskell zaczęła twój tweet z piosenką, którą omitowałem. I zaczęła z tego, że Iran celuje na Izraeli dzieci. And those Jadocidomaniacs she refers to are not in Tel Aviv, they are in Teheran. Which is another interesting question because it's not only like the brilliant example of double thinking or because like... To jasno pokazuje, że dla niej dzieci Izraelite są wartościowymi, ale te palestyńskie dzieci nie są wartościowe do wspomnienia, ponieważ są, myślę, Amalek, tak to nazywają, czy też zwierzętami czy czymkolwiek. Ale to też pokazuje, że...

If such genocidal regimes are let unchecked, they are never satisfied with what they are doing, because these wars in the Middle East that you are mentioning, somehow Israel is... Involved in many of them. And it's like Netanyahu was saying for at least 30 years that Iran is just about to build the nuclear bomb. And he was saying like Iran is going to bomb us any day. Now Iran is bombing Israel. All it took was for Israel to be hostile to Iran for many decades and bomb them. So it will really be hard to imagine that somehow we can pull it off and still keep the duration in check.

For some reason Israel is still doing that, although I think they are sleeping now and less and less people are falling for it. But what is the power of Israel that they can commit so many crimes and yet they can always portray themselves as victims? You bring a lot of points on the table and I'm just like... I can select three different ones. One is the selective empathy, recognizing some people as humans and others not. They are in the shock of something happening to Israeli children and totally dismissing of ignoring the catastrophe on Palestinian children or on Iranian civilians and children as well.

We are also talking about Iranian victims now. This is one point is what is allowed to Israel and what is not allowed to Israel. What is considered a crime and what is not. The second point is What is the meaning of international law? What is the meaning of a crime nowadays? Three, four years ago, when the criminal occupation invasion of Eastern Ukraine by Russia, it seems that the West was kind of clear on what is a war crime. Who is the aggressor and who is the victim? What are the crimes happening and who is the perpetrator?

Well now it doesn't seem so clear anymore, right? So also this war crime became very confused. Finally, there is the geopolitical question of what is Israel doing in the region. I think that for my past I'm more able to reply to the first two questions about the description of a crime, the description of rights and empathy and so on. What is doing Israel in the region? I will go more on the speculation on the political side, saying Israel is very much a proxy of imperial interest in Middle East. When I say empire, I don't imagine Star Wars, but empire really in the Tony Negri or Michal Hart.

Zrozumienie serii konvergencji mocy, w której nie ma prawdziwego serca, nie ma prawdziwego kapitału, nie ma prawdziwego imperium, ale jest system, który jest współczesnym kapitalizmem neoliberalistycznym, w którym są różne firmy, różne korporacje, różne instytucje, różne kraje. Wszyscy współpracują w tym. Obviously United States in the most privileged position of power, but this empire has Israel as their proxy, it's their guy in the region, which is the result of... Not few years, it's not from the war and terror on, this is a result of a colonial history of Western Europe and US and by the fact many people still frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a colonization issue.

You just hear the word settlers and you remember yourself that this is a colonization going on by Israel in the region. Jeśli mogę wstąpić, pamiętajmy, że tacy Izraelici, którzy tam mieszkają, nie są ludźmi, którzy nie mają żadnej prawdziwej połączenia z tym krajem. Jest program, nie pamiętam teraz nazwę, But I actually know people like that who wants Israeli citizenship so they announce I'm now converted to Judaism so now I'm a Jew and then they use this legal provision from the Israeli state which says like every Jew has a right to return to his land given by the God and they can move there and the government has special programs for them so basically you are say Polish, Czech or whatever.

Names mentioned by the Israeli law, you have more rights to settle in Israel than people who always live there, the Palestinian people. Yeah, yeah, definitely. The right to return is the key expression here, because this is what Palestinians are demanding. Palestine 48, for instance, the people who were expelled during the Nakba, just after the Second World War. This right to return was the key point of their political action. You know that there are millions of refugees in the neighboring country, but When people look at Gaza and they see that it's such a small street with so many inhabitants, you know, we have more than 2 million inhabitants in a very narrow street of 40 square kilometers, how come it is so crowded?

Right to return to fundamental for the Palestinian narrative and it is so absurd that this right to return became a policy for Jewish people from all over the world, basically, that they can go and freely take possession of a land. And I would like to stress it, it's not they are like actual Jewish people from Israel who are actually returning there. No, everybody can convert to Judaism and become a Jew and then they fall into scope of this law. It is part of this messianic religious extremism, right? It's again, we go back to the war of words, right?

This conflict on linguistic, really, because you really rarely hear or read on the media in the West about Israel's state as a fundamentalist regime. By de facto, the presence of ultra-religious terrorist rhetoric in their government, even in their ministers. It's so radical that if you would hear it from any other country, which is not aligned with Western interest, it would be considered a fundamentalist regime, basically. Ale nawet kraj, który byłby w porównaniu z interesami wschodnimi. Możesz sobie wyobrazić, że Niemcy wprowadzają specjalne prawa, które preferują niemieckich, aryjskich mieszkańców od wszystkich innych mieszkańców aryjskich i mówią, co jest z tym nie tak?

Names mentioned in the video. Names mentioned in the video. And also wipe out those people, you know, this another very famous slogan like land with no people for people with no land. It was no land with no people. It was land of plenty of people, Jewish, Palestinian, all other nations. Ale zanim przejdziemy do tego, chciałbym wspomnieć, bo powiedziałeś, że na początku stworzyli te kłamstwa, aby ustalić ich akcje, np.

o tych uchylonych dzieciach w owniach, czy czymkolwiek. Ale nie wiem, czy zauważyłeś, że Izrael już nie bada o dostarczanie kłamstw. Pamiętasz, kiedy zaczęli bombardować szpitali? Tak, tak, tak. Słyszeli, że tam jest basa Hamas i robili się idiotami, przyprowadzili do doktora Rota i powiedzieli, że to jest dokument Hamas, pewnie pamiętacie to bardzo dobrze. Teraz nawet się nie kłóci, bo wiedzą, że świat będzie się o tym kłócić, więc po prostu zabali wszystkich, każdego z 400. However, there was like health clinics and hospitals and pharmacies and everything.

They bombed universities, they bombed orphanages, they bombed everything. And they don't even bother to provide any lies. They just repeat this like we want our hostages back. Even when the hostages freed themselves and were heading back with white flags speaking Hebrew, they still shoot them. It's no longer a tactic, it's like a frenzy, I would say. Yeah, but it's not needed anymore, because you do this when you're afraid of a reaction, right? Jest to tak, jakbyś strzelił stonę trochę daleko i zobaczył, czy coś się wydarzy. Jeśli nic się nie wydarzy, będziesz kontynuował więcej. Myślę, że to jest zrozumiałe z punktu widzenia strategii.

Reminds me this old Polish joke about the guy who murdered his wife and then he said in court, oh no no, I was just like sharpening my knife and she tripped and fell onto my knife very unfortunately and that happened 27 times in a row. So this is the kind of excuses they are giving us and yet even the... Polish government who calls up the Russian ambassador whenever a rocket flows into the Polish airspace for 20 seconds. Not that the ambassador is bothering to turn up, but at least they are doing something. When they murder with cold blood a Polish citizen, the Polish foreign minister is politely asking

Jewish Ambassador, if he would be maybe so kind and spared some time for a nice friendly conversation. This is really outrageous that everybody is so afraid to say what's happening and to put Israel responsible for what they are doing. It is. And I think this connects to a point that is very dear to my heart, which is the dissolution of international law as it is. Nie ma żadnej ochrony, żadnego oświetlenia praw, ponieważ już nie wierzymy w to. Nie czujemy, że to jest nielegalne, czujemy tylko, że...

My big brother doesn't like this or like this. It is all about power these days. It's not that it was not the case in the past, but I would say that until the beginning of the 21st century there was still a kind of understanding that the international law system created after Second World War The problem with international law is that it is based on the mutual acceptance of the law of the different parties. So all the ruling powers decide that these principles are valid and then we will abide to these principles. Ale kiedy pojawia się bardzo mocny zmiany w balansie mocy i ktoś może bardzo wolno powiedzieć, że prawo międzynarodowe jest wyjątkowe, nie zależy od tego.

Będziemy nowym prawem, zmienimy to, co chcemy zrobić, zrobimy to. Wypadkiem tego jest świat z bólu, który jest światem dzisiaj. And the violence of this world make also possible for an entire set of countries like European Union to have no voice at all. Because the only opinion they can share is a military strategy. Either you're with us or you're against us. There is no more a kind of understanding of international politics based on principles or international law or United Nations and so on, because these have no value and the value has been taken away by the ruling powers.

As a consequence, if you are the proxy of the hegemonic power in Middle East, if you are Israel, international law doesn't apply to you. If you are an enemy of the empire, international law is taken in every possible way. So this for me, it's the greatest crisis on the legal term of our days. The international law in other nations are dying in front of our eyes. Let's focus on that because that's a very important point you make and I would like to make two observations here. First, that Israel is on the top of the biggest offenders against the international law, against the human rights and everything. Nobody does anything about it, because the US is always backing them, veto some resolutions in the UN.

Not that the resolutions will mean anything, but it's a symbolic gesture. And second, that it is not only when it comes to crimes and those humanitarian aspects of the Israeli politics. I can give you... An example, you probably heard about that, if not, then you may learn. So, as you probably are well aware, there was plenty of Jewish people in Poland before the war. And unfortunately, most of them perished during the war, during the Holocaust and everything. And as they were Polish citizens, mostly, the Polish law says if citizen dies,

And there is no descendants. Nobody is to inherit his property. The property becomes the property of the state. This is the Polish law. The law of the country, this guys and women and everybody were citizens of. So us with the Polish law, if someone died in the war, Twelve months later, if there were no contact with them, the law decides he is deceased in the war, and if there are no descendants, the property comes, the property of the state. No matter if you are Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, German, whatever. If you are a Polish citizen, that was the case. But Israel claims that those properties of the Polish citizens who perished in Holocaust should somehow be a property of Israel.

Names mentioned are not even sensible, because Israel hasn't existed back then even, so had no claim even back then. And of course the Polish government disagrees with that, so what they do? They go to America and they sue Poland in American court and the American court rules that Poland is supposed to do this and that. Of course in Poland nobody does anything because to a surprise of many people American legal system has no jurisdiction in Poland, but that's... Names mentioned on how the world order collapses around Israel. Names mentioned on how the world order collapses around Israel.