PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: Uncovering the inner workings of an AI genocide
This transcript was generated using an AI transcription service and lightly edited for readability. Please consult the corresponding audio before quoting.
Ben Reiff:
[music]
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Yuval Abraham’s bio on +972 Magazine will tell you merely that he is a journalist and filmmaker based in Jerusalem. Before publishing one of his latest investigations a few weeks ago, I asked if he wanted to update this bio and he replied, “I think that’s still accurate.” I said, “Yuval, you’ve won an Oscar since then.” And he responded, “Yeah, but I wouldn’t want to brag about it in my bio.” So today I’m going to brag on his behalf. Yuval Abraham is the co-director of the Oscar winning documentary No Other Land, which tells the story of efforts by the Israeli state and settlers to erase the Palestinian communities of Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank.
A reporter for +972 and Local Call, Yuval has written for both websites since 2019, mostly covering the impacts of the Israeli occupation on Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But since October 2023, his attention has focused squarely on Gaza and the inner workings of Israel’s genocide in the Strip. His groundbreaking investigations have been read by millions all around the world. They’ve been used in legal efforts to hold Israel accountable at The Hague, and they forced one of the world’s largest tech companies to block the Israeli military’s access to their products, and he’s not done yet. Yuval, thanks for joining us today.
Yuval Abraham
Thank you, Ben. I think we are not done yet, because I appreciate this embarrassing introduction and thoughtful introduction, and I want to say to our listeners that Ben has been the Editor or one of the editors that has really been in this journey with me throughout the past two years, and really a brilliant editor. And much of the work that we did, I think, Ben, is because of you and because of our shared work together. So I really want to thank you also for these last two years. And I’m happy to be here.
Ben Reiff
Far too kind and really good to have you with us. So over the past two years, I think it’s fair to say that your investigations have shaped how the world understood Israel’s war on Gaza. We don’t have time to get into all of them today. But just to give listeners a quick reminder, you were the first to reveal that Israel was using AI to generate a list of suspected militants to kill in Gaza with minimal human oversight. You exposed how the army was weaponizing gas byproducts from its bombs to increase the chances of killing Hamas commanders underground, often at the expense of the lives of Israeli hostages.
You highlighted the complicity of tech giants in storing whole troves of Israel’s surveillance on Palestinians, which was used to plan airstrikes, and you revealed the existence of an internal Israeli intelligence database implying that 83% of Gaza’s dead were civilians. And that’s barely scratching the surface of your work. We’re going to get into the nuts and bolts of how these investigations came together. But to start with, maybe you can tell us what drew you to investigative journalism in the first place, and why after years of more traditional field reporting, you decided that this would be your focus after the war started.
Yuval Abraham
I think for two main reasons. The first is that I felt after years and years of being in the West Bank, especially in Masafer Yatta but not only, and understanding what I’m doing as bearing witness to the consequences of the Israeli occupation, especially on Palestinians and Palestinian communities that are being ethnically cleansed, writing in English, but also in Hebrew honestly, out of a sense of responsibility, out of wanting to reach the Israeli society and to communicate to the people that are part of my society, what the reality of our occupation, what it really looks like.
I felt after October 7th that several things happened. First of all, I felt that the Israeli society became so genocidal, so openly racist that much of this was not having — not only was it not having an effect anymore — I also began sensing that people are actually happy to read about it so it felt kind of pointless from that regard.
Also there was a lot of international interest. I think Palestinians, like Palestinian journalists on the ground, were documenting the atrocities happening to them, and there was this entire vacuum or vacant space with regards to what is happening inside the Israeli military system or inside power — basically Israeli power — from a critical perspective. I felt that not a lot of people were doing that at the time. The Israeli media, as you know, Ben, really became, especially in the first months, completely aligned with the narrative of the military. There was no willingness at all to criticize the army. That made that kind of vacuum even bigger, or this gap that we could step into.
And I think the second reason that I felt it was important was that there was this narrative, there still is this narrative that, “yes, there are some crimes that are happening, but they are the exception, or they are irregular, or they are not a reflection of policy. It’s a soldier that’s committed a mistake. These are mistakes, right?,” we hear that often. I felt it was important to show from the inside by speaking to soldiers and officers how much this is policy. When you focus on that, that suddenly implicates an entire system: It’s not just one individual who made a mistake or, like, executed a Palestinian. No, these are protocols, they implicate the Prime Minister, they implicate the Chief of Staff, they implicate the more senior people involved.
Ben Reiff
From your reporting, I think two main things stand out as having changed dramatically after October 7th with regard to Israeli military policy, which made this war so different from all of Israel’s previous assaults on Gaza. The first is the expanded authorization for so-called “collateral damage” when conducting airstrikes and the second is how Israel generated targets for bombing — that’s both humans and infrastructure. Can you talk us through those two shifts?
Yuval Abraham
So collateral damage is what the Israeli military would describe as the number of civilians who the army’s intelligence departments expect will be killed alongside a target. So the target can be a building or a physical target, or a target can be an individual that they are trying to assassinate. Specifically, when they were trying to assassinate individuals in the past, in 2021 or 2014, these individuals would need to be relatively higher-ranking in Hamas or Islamic Jihad or whoever, and the collateral damage had some limitation. It’s important to say massive war crimes have been committed both in 2014 and in 2021. It’s not as if the Israeli military policies were okay back then or were not criminal back then.
But the authorization to knowingly kill civilians after October 7th really went out of the roof. So what we’ve reported on, as was later confirmed by The New York Times, is that the authorization that soldiers received was to kill up to 20 civilians — this could be 20 children, 20 babies; they don’t distinguish between women, men, and children. So knowingly kill up to 20 civilians when the target is a suspected low-ranking militant in Hamas — that’s anybody who is in the military wing of Hamas — it could also be people who are not in the military wing of Hamas, it could be someone who is part of the civilian apparatus of Hamas. It often were people who were suspected of being Hamas militants and were not in reality militants. Up to 20 civilians when these are junior militants and hundreds of civilians when we’re talking about more senior ranking militants in Hamas or PIJ.
I think one point that is not often mentioned is that these people are being targeted in civilian spaces as part of the way the Israeli army works. So these people are being targeted most of the time when they are inside their houses, when they are with their families — this is not being done by mistake, this is not being done because the civilian spaces are being used as human shields. I’m not saying that Hamas doesn’t do that at all, but in the majority of cases, Israel targets suspected militants inside civilian spaces, inside their private houses, because it is, one, easier for them from an intelligence standpoint, and two, the system was just built that way.
One of the sources that I spoke with, he said something that really stuck with me, he said that “the logic was quantity over quality.” They wanted to create as many targets as possible. This was called the “Dahiya Doctrine,” which is a doctrine that was developed in Lebanon to create a shock effect. They got it from the Americans, from “Operation Shock and Awe” in Iraq in 2003. This is a doctrine, a military doctrine, that emphasizes quantity. It emphasizes creating terror or fear among civilians by creating this massive shocking bombing campaign. What that source told me was that when you place the emphasis on quantity, this leads you to the private houses — say you want to get the rocket launchers, the ammunition warehouses, the military bases, if they exist, the tunnel infrastructure where Hamas is controlling the war — okay, there are a few hundred targets that you can create like that. But if you want to go to tens of thousands of targets, to place this emphasis on quantity, to bomb Gaza a lot, then you move on to civilian houses because you have so much of that. Because what that source said, he said, “if we suspect that there are 40,000 militants in Hamas, each one of those militants has a private house.” That immediately creates an aspiration to get 40,000 houses. If there are 40,000 militants, there are going to be 40,000 civilian houses.
And when I tell these people, well, look, “if you’re speaking about bombing 40,000 houses and in each one of the houses you can kill up to 20 people, you can do the math in your head.” That’s genocide, that’s an annihilation of a people and of a society, which is being done through this framework of civilian houses, bombing militants, and collateral damage.
Often they say, “yes, that’s true. That is the consequence of that policy.” There are systems, we exposed one of them called ‘Where’s Daddy?’ that actually notifies Israeli intelligence when these people enter their houses. So when they return home, when they speak to their families, when a child asks their mom, like, “where is daddy? Is he home?” These kinds of things are being done on an automatic and massive scale over tens of thousands of people. So one, collateral damage. Two, where these people are being attacked, which I think is very, very, very crucial and is often not looked at in the same way.
And three, as you said, the way the targets are generated. There was no way to mark so many people for assassination — to map out tens of thousands of people — without AI, especially in the initial stages. In the beginning, they had no idea who was in Hamas or not in Hamas. So they used an AI program that was nicknamed “Lavender”— it’s a machine learning algorithm that scans the entirety of Gaza’s population — so we’re talking about more than two million people in Gaza who were scanned by “Lavender.” They were each given a rating that reflects the likelihood that they are a member of the Hamas or Islamic Jihad military wings and then they created an arbitrary threshold saying “anybody who is above that threshold, received the high enough rating, we will consider them statistically as a member of the military wings. And these individuals, as long as we know where they are, can be bombed without authorization.”
They didn’t need to supervise, they didn’t understand — it’s a black box, it’s not as if the intelligence officer has knowledge or understanding of how this AI system made the decision that it made. They had to check that it was a male and not a female — that was the only check, the only form of supervision that was in place for many, many months, plus, again, the so-called collateral damage. So you kill that individual who could be in Hamas or not, or perhaps not, with everybody in the house, sometimes everybody in the building. These are the three points, collateral damage, civilian houses, and AI-based generation.
I think if you combine these three different elements or points, the result we’ve seen, much of what we’ve seen, the Air Force do. I think ground soldiers, it’s different. But the aerial bombing campaign, which is responsible for at least tens of thousands of Palestinians who were killed and murdered, these are the fundamental logics that have guided it.
Ben Reiff
Now, we’ve joked in the past as a team about the fact that I think you might be the only journalist in Israel who can walk into a refugee camp in the West Bank and get Palestinians affiliated with armed militias to speak to you openly, while also being able to get Israeli soldiers to divulge essentially internal military secrets. This is something that people often ask me after reading your investigations. So how do you go about finding sources in the army and gaining their trust?
Yuval Abraham
Most of the people that I speak with are not people that text me and are like, “we want to speak with you.” Much of it is an active pursuit: It is approaching the people, it is trying to convince the people, it is building a relationship with other people. Talking to someone and asking them, “do you know someone who could be related to this topic?” And then they connect you with someone who connects you with someone who connects you with someone, and in the end, you reach the right person who tells you, “wow, I never thought about speaking with a journalist before. This is not a thought that has crossed my mind.”
When you speak with sources, they have a million different things that they want to talk about. I make the expectations clear from the beginning. I tell them, “look, we’re going to speak, sometimes we talk for four, five, six hours. But in the end, most of this is not going to appear in the story.” They understand that I have the power in the end to choose what the story is about. Sometimes, sources would talk about things that they find interesting that are not interesting for me, and then we don’t include them in the story. Our investigations are very set, they have a very sharp focus, right? We’re focused on exposing war crimes, we’re focused on accountability.
Ben Reiff
And when you’re speaking to sources that are not exactly aligned, at least not completely aligned, with the mission and values of +972, how do you navigate those differences and reconcile a source’s agenda or bias with the story that you want to tell with this investigation?
Yuval Abraham
I think it’s important to stay true to what the source is saying but then also, when we write the story in the end, we contextualize it — we include Palestinian voices in it, we include our understanding of what is happening on the ground. Sometimes the quotes would be a quote of what the person has said, but if we feel that it is too much leaning towards, or close to the Israeli military spokesperson’s narrative, then we would, of course, contextualize it and put it in the right context and include Palestinian voices also in the story. It depends.
I think some sources, I understand that they will not speak to me again after the story comes out. Sometimes you speak to a source just to confirm something that you’re writing about and it’s okay. In the end, we need to get the information, so sometimes I’m fine with that. If a source gets angry at me politically afterwards and says, “I’m not willing to talk to you again,” it’s fine, it can happen also.
Ben Reiff
And what can you tell us about the kind of soldier who wants to speak to you and what motivates them to tell you about the injustices that they’re witnessing and taking part in?
Yuval Abraham
First of all, I try not to analyze them too much, because if somebody is speaking to me, I’m very happy that this is happening. Sometimes I don’t know why, sometimes I myself am surprised. Especially if they talk to me and then they’re like, “yeah, and we saw your documentary and we read what you write.” So often I feel this contradiction where an individual on the one hand is taking part in a system that is obviously committing crimes and on the other hand, is very critical towards that system. It’s interesting, I think sometimes human beings can hold contradictory things inside of them.
The way I think about it is I would maybe describe, there are two categories. The first are people who are feel guilt, or feel like they witnessed atrocities — whistleblowers, essentially — these kinds of individuals who either hold positions of power or are in proximity to power, on the one hand, and on the other hand, have a certain moral compass or are appalled by what they’re seeing. These people have proven to be really, really good sources for really important investigative stories throughout the history of journalism. In Israel, military service is mandatory so there are a lot of people who are part of the military system.
Much of the society, honestly, is somehow involved or is somehow complicit in what has happened over the past two years. Not everybody, of course, but even when the Israeli society is so right-wing, you can find people who are critical inside the system and it takes time to find them and I think this is one category of people, “the whistleblowers.”
The other category of individuals are people who just don’t see a problem with what they are doing, so they are willing to speak about it. It’s like the complete opposite of “the whistleblowers.” They are part of the system, they are proud of what they are doing, and when a curious journalist calls them and wants to talk about it, they are happy to talk about it. I think there’s a lot of people in-between but these are the two poles, the two ends of sources.
Ben Reiff
Once you’ve received a tip from a source, something that’s completely new that you’ve never heard about before, how do you then go about verifying that information and what needs to happen for you to be certain that it’s correct?
Yuval Abraham
It depends what kind of verification and of course the gravity of the claim that that is being made. If we are in a position where we only have testimonies, I would need quite a few sources — I think at least three, often four or five, sometimes we had even 12 to confirm that point, especially if the claim is big. That’s challenging, it is challenging especially if you’re talking about something very specific.
So say, like a specific strike. I can give an example, we reported on strikes against senior Hamas commanders like Ibrahim Biari or Ayman Nofal, where the military has authorized hundreds of Palestinian civilians — they don’t know where exactly the Palestinian is — often these are Palestinians who are inside tunnels. So when we were describing these kinds of particular strikes, it’s challenging to confirm it, because if it’s just a testimony, you need, I think, as I said, at least three, and then to find at least three people who were who witnessed the strike, who know what happened, who can confirm the collateral damage that was authorized. It takes a long time.
Sometimes you feel bad about it, because you have information that should be out there, and it’s crucial information — it’s information that can create pressure that might, at the end of the day, save lives, or I don’t know, or at least pressure to end the genocide, to end the war. But at the end of the day, you’re a journalist, and you have to be a million percent sure that what you’re publishing is accurate. You’re not an activist. And you often feel this contradiction, that you really want the information to be out there, but you can’t publish it until you get that one extra source. And it can drive you crazy, because you have two sources, and you need one more source and you are so sure that it’s true. But it’s like, no, you have to be a million percent sure that it’s true.
That’s if it’s testimonies but of course, the best place to be is to have documents as well or to have some kind of something tangible that you can, like a WhatsApp group, an image, a video. And I think when you have that and you confirm that it’s authentic, then that could be enough.
Ben Reiff
You mentioned earlier the fact that most of the killing in Gaza was carried out not by ground forces, although these were responsible for a lot of atrocities, but rather by soldiers in the Air Force and in intelligence. In other words, those responsible for conducting and authorizing strikes on residential buildings, family homes — killing dozens, if not hundreds of Palestinian civilians at a time. And these soldiers tend to come from the elites of Israeli society, right? Many of them consider themselves to be on the liberal end of the political spectrum and it is testimonies from these soldiers that have formed the basis of a lot of your investigations. You’ve written recently about how, although they clearly felt some discomfort about what they were doing, virtually none of them would say they were involved in a genocide. How do you explain that tension?
Yuval Abraham
First of all, it’s absolutely correct. Most of the Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip were killed by pilots who were part of an operation that involves military intelligence and various kinds of researchers, both in the Israeli military and in the Israeli Air Force, who statistically belong to this group of so-called Israeli “center-left.” Basically the anti-Netanyahu folks, the people who were protesting in the streets of Tel Aviv.
Obviously, the right and the far-right are responsible for horrific, horrific atrocities, and they are the ones leading the country, they are like the political echelon. I’m not removing the responsibility from that group either. But, I think that while the, let’s say, the more right-wing soldiers often had explained what they were doing to themselves in openly genocidal language, the idea that “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza,” that they are “all somehow involved in October 7th,” you watch Channel 14 and you hear what they say, right? That is a reflection of that mindset.
What I saw often among the other group, the center-left group, was a mindset that I would say is mission-oriented. They need to have some kind of military objective, they need to be told that there is some kind of military objective. It doesn’t really matter what that military objective is or how convincing it is, but it’s more of this philosophical mindset. You need to have some kind of objective that you can say, “this is what I am aiming at I’m not a murderer I’m not a monster I’m not just killing civilians to kill civilians no I have something that I’m firing at,” and once you have that then anything, any means, any kind of damage to civilians in the way would be acceptable.
It’s a different kind of mindset — it’s a mindset where you focus on a specific objective, on a specific tree, and you ignore the forest of genocide. You ignore the fact that when you listen to Netanyahu saying, “we are destroying all of Gaza or all of the houses so they have nowhere to return to,” when you listen to the head of intelligence, Aharon Haliva, who says, “for every Israeli that was killed on October 7th, we need to kill 50 Palestinians to do a second Nakba, and it doesn’t matter if they are children.” You listen to the leaders of the state speaking about genocide, yet you can ignore that because your specific military objective is to hit some militant in some house, and as long as you tell yourself that you are hitting a militant, then it’s fine to burn down a school.
As long as you tell yourself that you’re hitting a militant, then hitting a hospital on the way or hitting an entire residential block on the way is collateral damage. I think this framework, this mindset of collateral damage — of military targets and collateral damage — really has allowed, one, more Israelis for much longer periods of time to take part in these atrocities, especially the center-left group. That’s number one. Number two, I think it allowed more people from the international community to tell themselves, “well maybe it’s okay that we are sending weapons and money to Israel while they are doing this because this is not some barbaric, indiscriminate slaughter. No, they have these objectives, or military objectives.”
And of course, number three, I think this is the way Israel will defend itself against the genocide accusation. They’re going to say in The Hague, I think, they’re going to say in The Hague, “look, yes, it’s true we killed many, many civilians, but we always had some kind of military objective behind it. Yes, we bombed the school, but we did it because there was a suspect in one of the classrooms.” I think to me, it doesn’t really matter, at the end of the day, these are more like internal mechanisms that allow people to partake in the mass killing and also there are forms of justification that will aim to legally kind of whitewash what Israel has done.
Ben Reiff
Almost all of the sources you quote in your investigations are anonymous, which has generated some frustration among I would say two groups of readers: one that sees the use of anonymous sources as sufficient reason to dismiss and discredit your articles because they can’t verify your findings themselves and another group that questions the value of protecting the anonymity of people who are effectively admitting to war crimes. So how would you respond to both of those positions?
Yuval Abraham
Well, for the first group, I would say, “yeah,” I mean, obviously, like, if I could use people who are not anonymous, we’re always trying to get people on the record. And sometimes we succeed, like some of our stories included Israeli military officials who confirmed them on the record. But in other cases, this was not possible, and that is unfortunate — we are constantly trying to get people to go on the record. I would say that often, our reporting has been subsequently verified by other media outlets, by legacy media. Sometimes it happened much later like The New York Times or The Washington Post. So I think that to me could show a skeptical reader that what we are reporting on is accurate. And as I said, accuracy is very, very important to us.
For the second group of people, what I would say is a few things. First of all, I’m not a prosecutor, that’s not what I do. I’m a journalist and for me, what is important is the information. If in order to get the information out there, I have to maintain anonymity of certain people, then that is what I would do. I think that is my role at the end of the day as a journalist. Second thing I would say is that it’s true that some of the people that I speak with have committed crimes, they have personal culpability for those crimes. But their discoveries are also implicating an entire system, and they also have meaning for the people who have led that system, who we know who they are. We know who is the Chief of Intelligence, we know who is the Chief of the Israeli Navy, we know who headed the country and I think I would ask that second group of people, faced between the option of not having the story out there at all, or having it out there with anonymous sources, which is, to me, the two options that I have. Also from a perspective of accountability, which is what this second group cares about, I think the second option is better. It’s better to have the stories out there.
Ben Reiff
As a media outlet headquartered inside Israel, we are subject to the Israeli military censor. So what that means for listeners who aren’t familiar is we are required by law to submit for review prior to publication any article that reveals new information about “security issues,” which is obviously a very broad term. And the censor can demand redactions or it can bar an article from publication altogether.
Now, we’re also forbidden by law from revealing which articles the censor has interfered with and where in the article it made reductions, if at all. Failure to comply with these regulations can potentially result in fines or even the shutting down of a publication and the arrest of reporters or editors. So that’s a lot of restrictions. By the way, Israel is the only self-professed Western democracy to operate an institution like this. But what can you tell us about how you navigate the military censor when working on your investigations? And what it means that everything we do eventually publish in your investigations has been approved for publication by the censor.
Yuval Abraham
Maybe I can speak about how it works, often Meron, who is my editor in Local Call, Meron Rappaport, he’s the one who speaks with the military censorship. I’ve done it a few times, it’s always a very strange experience. You do it over the phone, like they don’t send you anything written. You speak to a military officer, who sits somewhere in Tel Aviv, I think, and they go paragraph by paragraph, and they tell you, like, “that line delete it; that word is not good, delete it.” And that’s how they go over the story. Now, the kind of decisions that we have to make, one, like, after the censorship censors parts of the story, do we still want to publish it? Sometimes we look at the story and we say the censorship drains so much of what we wanted to say in the story that we would be doing a disservice to our readers if we publish it like this because we know that the real story is so much worse.
Generally I can tell readers whatever you’re reading — and I’ve learned this not only because of the censorship but because I feel that we are only exposing the tip of the iceberg — the reality is worse. That’s my intuition based on years and years and years of reporting about the West Bank and Gaza. The reality is worse, like what you’re reading, what you’re seeing, what manages to get out, what little documentation there is — sometimes it’s not little — but what documentation exists, what people who are willing to give a testimony, the actual reality is worse. Sometimes we feel that the story does not reflect reality anymore. So we always have the option not to publish when that happens.
I think that we’ve found ways to try to get as much as we can published. It requires you to do much more journalistic work because often if you manage to find a piece of information that was already published somewhere. So it’s often finding, you know, finding this article in some very marginal magazine in Hebrew that once mentioned somewhere something similar to what we are writing about, which then kind of forces the censorship to allow us to report on what we want to report about. I think having a quantity of testimonies helps, like if you interview six, seven, eight people, okay, they remove one, two, three testimonies, you still have enough to publish.
We are, as a publication, constantly pushing back against this. Like, we don’t want to be in that position. But we are based here so we have these limitations, again, or we would be shut down, or we would not be able to continue. So again, to the people criticizing us for doing it, people need to understand we are faced with two options: It’s either we stop writing because we will be shut down if we bypass the censorship, or we try to do our best within the limitations of the system that we are under and that is our choice. I think it’s having to choose between two bad options, but we want to continue writing because I think we are doing very important work on the ground. And if right now, in order to continue to operate, it means that we have to send it to the military censorship that is, I think, what we will continue to do while constantly pushing back against it, while constantly trying to get as much published, and also remembering that we are loyal first and foremost to public interest and to our readers and if we feel that a story, because of the censorship, is no longer reflective of reality, we are not going to publish it.
Ben Reiff
Readers may or may not be aware that all of your investigations for +972 are published in collaboration with Local Call, which is a Hebrew language site operating under the same organizational umbrella as +972 and with whose editorial team we work closely but independently. So these articles have also made a splash within Israeli society, but what can you tell us about the reactions and the responses that your articles get in Hebrew versus how they’re received around the world in English?
Yuval Abraham
It’s a good question and it depends on which article. So the article about “Lavender,” that was really interesting because in English, in the international media, it was received with a lot of shock, people criticized the way the Israeli military used AI, the U.N. spoke about it, the White House spoke about it — it caused an uproar internationally. In Israel, it was viewed quite favorably by the mainstream. It wasn’t picked up as widely. It didn’t create such a big splash in Israel, but it was also strange to see that the way it was reported or followed up in much of the Israeli media was like, “look at our amazing technology, the way we are hunting down these people, the IDF is an advanced military and what not.” I think that there was a big gap there.
I often found that the Israeli media reacts strongly or is forced to react strongly when there is some kind of real tangible impact. So I think with our story about Microsoft, about the fact that Unit 8200 stored a massive trove of Palestinian phone calls, of mass surveillance information, on Microsoft’s public cloud, which then led Microsoft to shut down that technology for Unit 8200, that obviously created a huge splash in Israel and the media, which was at first skeptical towards our reporting, which said, “ah, this is probably not true, and even if it’s true, it has no meaning.” Then, when Microsoft independently confirmed our reporting and shut down access to Unit 8200, which was the first case that a major big tech, one of the big tech U.S. companies does this kind of sanction, that caused the Israeli media to talk about it.
They react to impact, they also react to legacy media reporting on our reporting, or like to big media outlets. So we’ve often worked with The Guardian together on our stories with a brilliant team of investigative journalists at The Guardian, like Harry Davies and Emma Graham-Harrison and Bethan McKernan and others and often they would pick up the fact that the story has been reported on in The Guardian. The story is not a certain war crime that has been exposed, it is the fact that it has been exposed in The Guardian. That is the story — we’ve also seen that dynamic happening, which was quite funny and weird to see.
Ben Reiff
I remember also a case with an investigation that we did with The Guardian around Israel’s nine-year campaign of spying and intimidation against the ICC in order to try and thwart the war crimes probe the way that was received in Israel was, “wow, go Mossad. This is an amazing campaign.”
Yuval Abraham
Yeah, The Guardian revealed that Yossi Cohen, who was the head of Mossad at the time and a very close ally to Netanyahu, was sent to threaten Fatou Bensouda, the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC. He showed her pictures of her husband, really like mafia-style tactics. I think some people, especially Netanyahu loyalists, were like, “yeah, Yossi Cohen!” But this was such an epic failure, like it’s not James Bond. You send Yossi Cohen, the head of Mossad, a known figure, to threaten Bensouda? Like how sloppy, even from Israel, it’s super sloppy. It’s like, what are you doing? It shows you the kind of mentality under Netanyahu of, “nothing is gonna hit us,” like you’re doing it openly, you don’t care.
Ben Reiff
Okay, we’ve spoken a lot about Gaza here, but in the West Bank right now we’re seeing a major, if not unprecedented, escalation in settler pogroms against Palestinian communities. Dozens of villages have been entirely wiped off the map in the past two years as a result of sustained violence, arson, and other forms of property destruction, often in the presence of the Israeli army, which almost never intervenes, never prosecutes violent settlers, which in effect grants them a shield of protection and impunity to keep doing what they’re doing. Now, your film, No Other Land, focused on Masafer Yatta, which I think can be seen as a microcosm of the West Bank as a whole. In March, the film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Four months later, Awdah Hathaleen from the village of Umm Al-Kheir, whose footage was used in the film and who used to write regularly for +972, was shot dead by an Israeli settler who was not prosecuted despite Awdah capturing his own murder on camera.
Clearly, despite the global recognition of the plight of Palestinians in general and of Masafer Yatta in particular, the situation on the ground only continues to deteriorate as the world watches on. How do you make sense of this disconnect and what do you think people around the world, including, I think, world leaders and the international media, may not fully grasp about the way Israeli apartheid operates in the West Bank on a daily basis?
Yuval Abraham
First of all, you know, when you were just laying out the facts right now, the facts that I know, but just hearing them one after the other is so shocking, Ben, really, like you think about Awdah dedicating his life to documenting the atrocities that are happening to his community every day, and then he’s documenting his own death, his own murder, and that having no effect, right? I think it tells you all you need to know about the idea that under the current Israeli system of military occupation there are severe crimes, and there is no accountability for them.
I think the second point is that, yes, these are settler pogroms, but they are done with the support of the Israeli state and the Israeli military. It’s not something that’s happening by individuals who are acting in a vacuum. You can get confused because I think some people have seen over the past few months Israeli ministers condemning the settler violence or framing that violence as a form of anarchism, as something that is somehow irregular or separate. No, I think that the system of military occupation in the West Bank is a violent system.
These settler pogroms are just an extension of that. Yes, they are a very extreme extension of that, but they thrive in a system of apartheid, they thrive in a system that is based on discrimination. That was really important for us when we made No Other Land for all of us, like all four of us, me and Rachel Szor, the Israeli side of the team, and Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, who are the Palestinian co-directors, we focused on the house demolitions because this is something that is being committed by the state.
So yes, it’s true, settlers have burnt down Palestinian villages, but the body responsible for most of the destruction of Palestinian villages and houses in the West Bank is the Israeli state, and of course in Gaza, where entire villages were wiped out off the map, and that was a state project. So there is a direct line linking between the wiping out of Shuja-iyya or Rafah or like other Palestinian cities and neighborhoods in Gaza, and the wiping out of Palestinian villages, or burning of Palestinian villages by Israeli settlers. These are things that are connected.
Ben Reiff
Okay, lastly, before we finish, we are in the midst of our end of year fundraising campaign. So I wanted to ask you how you see the role and the importance of independent media on the ground in Israel-Palestine in bringing these stories to the world. Why would you encourage listeners to support +972 Magazine?
Yuval Abraham
I can just say there is so much more to do. I feel like what we’ve done is maybe 5% of what we could have done if we had more resources and more journalists. We’re a very, very small team, we don’t have a lot of resources. When I’m working on a story, I know there are five other stories that are super important, that are super crucial, similar topics to what I’ve described that I can’t work on because there’s not enough time. And I feel really, really bad about it. And I wish we had enough money to hire more journalists and more editors and to get these stories out there.
And I think we are uniquely positioned because we are, one, on the ground, two, we are a team of Israelis and Palestinians who are working together, who have different perspectives, different access points, and we can combine those access points to at the end of the day deliver a journalistic product that I think is very high quality. Yes, we have our values of human rights, the sanctity of life, opposing apartheid, opposing the mass slaughter, on one hand, on the other hand, very rigorous journalistic values of fact-checking, of verifying everything that we are reporting on. So I think we are uniquely positioned to write these kinds of stories, and I hope that we get your support so we can continue to do that if you believe that, like me, that it’s important.
Ben Reiff
Yuval Abraham, thanks for joining the +972 Podcast.
Yuval Abraham
Thank you, Ben.
Ben Reiff
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This episode was produced by Jennifer Cutler, with help from the +972 Editorial Team. Make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a review. It really helps new listeners find the show. Visit 972Mag.com for in-depth reporting, analysis, and opinions from the ground in Israel-Palestine, and don’t forget to download the +972 app and subscribe to our newsletters.
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