Palestine Talks _ In conversation with Mark Perlmutter, volunteer doctor in Gaza
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Thank you so much, Mark, for sitting with me here today. My pleasure. Let's talk about a few things that I'm sure you're so knowledgeable about.
00:08Gaza, specifically your time in Gaza, what it was like returning from Gaza, and perhaps if we have some time, your views on the American medical establishment in relation to Palestinian solidarity.
00:23So perhaps we can start off by asking how you first got into humanitarian work as a doctor.
00:31During my hand surgery fellowship in Miami, University of Miami, it serves the Latin Basin, and I had noticed a large number of children that were coming in with birth defects.
00:46I spoke to a family once, and she told me that Ecuador, where they were from, had a ton of birth defects, way more than I would see in the United States.
00:58Probably from colonial times and consanguineous marriages that were induced upon the population, such that you could almost tell what region of Ecuador somebody's from by what birth defect they have.
01:13And many of them were cleft lips and palates, but thousands were club feet and club hands, very deformed hands and feet.
01:23And so I made arrangements to go to Guayaquil, Ecuador first, but 30 times later I was in Loja and many other towns in Ecuador, Cuenca.
01:40And so it became a passion of mine to go to Ecuador several times a year.
01:46And my ex-wife, whose heart is as big as a soccer ball, even started an adoption agency for Mexican adoptions.
01:57And we ended up adopting a child from Mexico together, who is my youngest child.
02:05And so overseas mission work hasn't stopped for me.
02:10I routinely go to Honduras now.
02:13Okay.
02:14So when it came to going to Gaza earlier this year, what went into that decision?
02:19Well, I didn't just go to do elective surgery in Gaza.
02:24I've always been drawn to national disaster areas as well, any place where I know that I could be of help.
02:32Because going to these, for elective surgical missions, I know what an austere environment is.
02:38And I also, particularly for St. Pedro Sula, Honduras, the pre-Ukraine war murder capital of the world, there's a tremendous lack of medical supplies and expertise and training that's catered towards the poor.
02:59The rich in every part of the world, as you know, have all the medical care they need.
03:03But three-fifths of the world will never see a doctor or a nurse their entire life.
03:08It's an amazing number of beating hearts and souls in our world that will never get even remote access to medical care.
03:16And so when 9-11 happened, I was at ground zero on 9-11.
03:22When the earthquake hit Haiti, I was in care for outside of Port-au-Prince through Port-au-Prince at a hospital that needed help.
03:32The day the earthquake hit, when Katrina hit, I was in on the tarmac triaging patients the day the earthquake hit land.
03:43So those are the type of events that have always attracted me.
03:46And I always found that you were helpful at, you know.
03:50So when Gaza came, I was running a telehealth service for mostly the Latin Basin where doctors that I'm helping advance their skills would send me photographs of a planned hand incision.
04:03As you know, I do mostly hand surgery.
04:05They would plan an incision for a birth defect on a hand.
04:08And I would say, no, I would make the incisions this way.
04:11Or, you know, they would send me x-rays.
04:14And I would give telehealth advice and sometimes even videos in real time in the middle of the night of a surgery that's taking place, a trauma surgery.
04:23And I started getting images from Gaza based on an invitation from a friend of mine.
04:29And early on, the x-rays were fine.
04:32What would you do here?
04:33What would you do here?
04:34You know, you're doing a great job.
04:36Then the quality of the pictures started to deteriorate dramatically and rapidly.
04:41Not the quality of the actual in terms of pixels or exposure.
04:45The quality of the work that was being done was rather elementary.
04:49And so I finally returned a text and challenged them at the risk of offending the doc and say, you know, this is not satisfactory.
04:58Can I ask you what level of training you have?
05:01Thinking this guy's going to be offended or a guy or girl's going to be offended.
05:05And as it turns out, the response was, I'm not an orthopedic surgeon.
05:09I'm a medical student.
05:11And we have a resident with us that did most of the work.
05:15What happened to the attendings, meaning the senior doctors?
05:18They were all killed in a bomb blast was the answer.
05:21So with that, I contacted a friend who got me in touch with a couple of agencies.
05:28PAMA is who I called first.
05:31They said, I'm sorry, but there's no space.
05:34All of our planned missions have an orthopedic surgeon attached to them already.
05:39Two or three days later, I got a call back saying that he backed out of the mission.
05:44Would you like to go?
05:45And so within a week, I was ready to go.
05:49And I'm already packed.
05:50I'm packed right now for another mission.
05:51I'm always packed.
05:54And I had 700 pounds of orthopedic supplies and four huge oversized bags always ready to go.
06:02And I left with 700 pounds of surgical trays with instruments and metallic implants that I need to do what I do.
06:11Drills, everything.
06:13And I always donate them wherever I go and leave them behind and bring back the empty suitcases.
06:21So anyway, I got there with 700 pounds.
06:25I got on airplanes and stood standby.
06:28It took a day and a half of flying standby to get to Cairo.
06:34I ended up getting a plane through Frankfurt to Cairo.
06:37And I landed in Cairo and got to the hotel, which was attached to the airport, an hour before the vans were leaving to go through the Sinai on the way to Rafah.
06:48So the timing was tight, but it was perfect.
06:51I mean, we've heard so much, of course, about the blockade that's still there on Gaza.
06:55It's horrible.
06:56Yes.
06:57I'm wondering if you could maybe expand on what it was like actually getting into Gaza.
07:01Well, first of all, the 15-hour ride to get through the Sinai was impressive, right?
07:10The only thing that you see almost the whole way is a wall that's keeping people from people.
07:20I was told it was just to keep the Bedouins out.
07:24But when we got to the Egyptian border, five hours there to get clearance to come through was arduous and fatiguing by itself because we got there.
07:34I was beyond exhausted getting there.
07:38I couldn't sleep on the ride in because of the quality of the drivers and the complete ignorance of this thing called painted lines on a highway.
07:55But when we got to Egypt, they almost didn't let our supplies through because of the lack of paperwork, even though we had clearance from the World Health Organization to bring our supplies in.
08:06But the Rafah Crossing was interesting.
08:08The most standout feature of it was me knowing, because I was being schooled on the way there, that Rafah itself, a strip of land the size of Philadelphia, needs 700 trucks a day to keep it alive.
08:21And we get to the Rafah Crossing, and as soon as we get through customs, still on the Egypt side, before we get on a separate set of buses to go into Gaza, we see 700 trucks.
08:34We think, oh my gosh, that's great.
08:36They're still getting their 700 supplies.
08:38These are going to go in today.
08:41But the trucks never crossed.
08:44So pursuant to your question, what was my feeling like?
08:48To put it in perspective, I'll answer it when we left.
08:51When the Rafah Crossing was still open, and it was open the whole time we were there, there weren't two lines of trucks for a couple miles long, side to side, bumper to bumper.
09:03Now there were eight rows of trucks side to side, hardly enough space to walk in between, literally inches between the bumpers, for a 30 miles walk.
09:16That's almost 300 miles of truck still waiting to get in with food supplies rotting on the back, loaded with potatoes, dead chickens, water tankers, medical supplies.
09:32And these trucks did not have obscured names shrunk wrap on the back of them.
09:36Oxfam, World Central Kitchen, Save the Children, UNHCR, the Turkish Red Cross or Green Crescent.
09:47There was food supplies from every Arabic country that was there with their name on it.
09:55Tons and tons of food and medical supplies.
09:58Clearly medical supplies there, none of which got in.
10:01And we know that because the 700 pounds of supplies that I alone took in were gone before the first week.
10:09Consumed.
10:11Dr. Sidhwa, I call him my professor.
10:14He taught me a lot about the politics and the history of the area and is a superb trauma surgeon in San Juan, Queen Valley in California.
10:24He brought in way more than I did, $40,000 out of his own pocket.
10:30And his supplies were gone at the same time mine were.
10:35The vacuum of supplies that were already in the hospital prior to us getting there was impressive.
10:42Such that what we brought, including the other team members who brought just as much as we did, if not more, it was gone.
10:53Could you maybe say how that, if at all, ties in with how hospitals were functioning or the capacity of hospitals as you saw when you first got there?
11:07And did it change for better at any point?
11:11Never changed for better, only got worse.
11:14We became the only functional hospital in the region.
11:17And we received, maybe our first week there, we noted that we were receiving transfers from every place else because of the lack of their supplies.
11:25A CAT scan machine was down.
11:27Their laboratory was hurt.
11:30And so we were receiving transfers of very sick people from other hospitals.
11:35Now, this is a hospital the size of the European Gaza hospital.
11:39It's the size of any small community hospital, right?
11:44200-bed hospital.
11:46There were 20,000 people living on the hospital grounds, most of which were sick and ill.
11:52The hospital itself had thousands of people living within the walls of the hospital.
11:58It had four areas called medines that were nothing but filled with hospitals, 100 beds in each one.
12:04There was 400 or 500 people infirmed in these beds, all with open wounds, all with fractures, all with needing further surgeries, all getting wound care.
12:15All needing wound care, few of them getting it.
12:19So the hospital system was impressively stressed.
12:24And how would you describe it?
12:26I mean, you sort of alluded to it right now.
12:28How would you describe the condition of most of the patients that you were working with?
12:33Dying or about to die, right?
12:36It's horrible.
12:38The bombs would go off constantly all day long.
12:41They were doing Ramadan, the meal at the end of Ramadan, Iftar.
12:46Right before Iftar, the drones would be more audible, clearly visualizing where people were congregating.
12:56And the bombs would concentrate in those areas.
12:59The effectiveness of a nondiscriminate 2,000-pound American bomb on a collection of women and children is much more impactful if you know where the people are collecting.
13:09And if 10 minutes after the bomb would go off in the distance, the few ambulances that were still operational and many, many cars and even donkey pulled and horse pulled carts would start showing up with injured people.
13:23And often in a room smaller than the space that we're sitting in, enough to hold four classic hospital gurneys, four gurneys would show up.
13:35And on each gurney was three to five kids, almost exclusively kids.
13:4190% of our new admissions were kids.
13:44And there'd be 15, 20 kids coming in at the end of every bombing.
13:50A third were dead by the time they got to us.
13:56And what else would start?
14:00A third would die in front of us.
14:05And a third we'd take to the operating room.
14:09And most of them would die.
14:17I mean, you shared already in a previous interview how you were able to ascertain that these children were targeted and targeted by snipers.
14:32Yes.
14:33I'm wondering if you can tell us how often that would happen on a daily basis.
14:41There's not a doc that's been there that probably can't testify that they didn't see kids shot in the head.
14:54I myself saw two children that were not shot just in the head, but in the chest first.
15:03Bullet holes exactly where I would put a stethoscope.
15:07And a second bullet hole directly in the side of a temple.
15:12One father, whose photograph I look at every night, explained to me how his kid was ripped out of his hand.
15:28And he went looking for him on the ground and couldn't find him.
15:31At 10 meters away, he found his kid and looked at him while he got shot the second time.
15:38But his father thought that was the first time.
15:41When he came to us, he had no organs when I rolled him over.
15:46He had no organs.
15:48A classic high-velocity bullet wound is a small entrance hole the size of the bullet, and the exit wall wound is capacious.
15:56In American football, it was the size of the hole in the kid's back.
16:03Everything between the shoulder blades and every organ in his chest was missing, including his spine.
16:10When I rolled him over, my hand fell into his chest, feeling his rib cage.
16:16And then when I rolled him back, the dressing fell off his head, and I saw his brains coming out of the other side.
16:27This kid was six years old.
16:30Next to him was another kid at the same time, who likewise had a hole directly in the center of his chest, went right in front of his ear, and came out of his neck.
16:45And no kid, and I've said this on many outlets, but it's the truth and it stands.
16:53No kid gets shot twice by mistake by a sniper.
16:59It doesn't happen by mistake.
17:01They were deliberately targeted.
17:03And that's not beyond a war crime.
17:06That's targeted assassinations.
17:11And it helped me formulate my opinion of what's really occurring in Gaza.
17:17I mean, that's why I started off the interview saying whether we could, or hoping that we could talk about what it was like actually coming back, because having witnessed this unspeakable cruelty.
17:29Right.
17:30And then coming to the US, and then shortly after, in the summer, you see Benjamin Netanyahu in Congress speaking.
17:38Right.
17:39To the applause of many.
17:40Right.
17:41What was that like for you?
17:42Well, let's address the applause of many first.
17:46That is strictly the fault of American laws that allow the AIPAC and the very strong evangelical Southern Christian groups to donate untold hundreds of millions of dollars to our politicians, which are just whores for the money.
18:03Right.
18:04We don't have term limits here.
18:05So they can run again and again and again.
18:07And their job security is how many votes they can garnish.
18:10And the level of support they get from this money that promotes a Zionistic attitude.
18:17And your readership has to understand and viewership has to understand that my anti-Zionistic approach is not anti-Judaism.
18:26Most of my living family, including my beloved twin sister, are conservative Jews.
18:33But Zionism is not Judaism.
18:38Right.
18:39And Zionism, and we can talk about this if you wish, is the biggest threat to Judaism in the world.
18:44Right.
18:45But it is my hatred of Zionism that makes me hate Benjamin Netanyahu.
18:53Right.
18:54He's a liar.
18:55I've said that in writing.
18:57I've said it verbally.
18:59And I've even invited him to sue me in American court so that the truth can come out.
19:05When he says that children are not being targeted, that's a blatant lie.
19:10Indeed, I believe that they are the specific target of the Israeli war.
19:15I do not believe that Hamas is the target and that the innocent Palestinian is a bystander.
19:21What I believe instead of what's happening is that Hamas is the excuse and that the Palestinian innocent bystander is indeed the intended target of the genocide that's actually taking place.
19:34And Hamas is just the excuse.
19:36The same way that Hezbollah is just the excuse for bombing Lebanon conveniently before the American election.
19:44This is actually a perfect segue because I want to ask you about that.
19:48I mean, do you see these...
19:51Sorry, I'll refrain then.
19:53So that's a perfect segue to what I want to actually ask you next about the elections.
19:57Do you see any of the candidates as being promising at all in terms of there being a ceasefire justice for Palestine?
20:07Well, Jill Stein has the best platform for a ceasefire and for supporting the lives of Palestinians.
20:13But she's not electable.
20:15Right.
20:16And she's never, regards to my knowledge, more than 1% of the vote, which means a vote, in my opinion, for Jill Stein, as much as I would like for her to be more competitive in the race.
20:27A vote for her is really a vote for Trump, who is the nightmare for the Middle East.
20:34And so although I have issues with Kamala Harris, she's getting my vote because that's the best chance that we have to save the lives of Palestinians.
20:44Even if she stops the dropping of one bomb, that's probably 200 people that will live.
20:52Right.
20:53And 80% of those will be babies.
20:56Yes.
20:57Yes.
20:59About the medical establishment, I mentioned it earlier, the American medical establishment specifically.
21:06I'm wondering what your thoughts are in terms of collectively the extent to which it's gone to provide...
21:14The medical establishment is quite maturely on the side of Israel because of donated monies.
21:20Even my own medical school at Thomas Jefferson receives hundreds of millions of dollars of donation from Jewish interests under the pretense that to be anti-Zionistic again is to be anti-Semitic.
21:35And so a perfect example would be, with my personal experience, when we were in Gaza, we've identified many medical students that were going to be student leaders
21:46because they found this one of the few remaining hospitals from very far away.
21:51These medical students would come into the hospital to volunteer, often leaving their families behind so that they can play doctor and help the injured.
22:01Right.
22:02So they declared themselves as student leaders in the medical field in Gaza.
22:07Right.
22:08That we started medical school classes when we were there.
22:12Right.
22:14And they continued until the last person left, which was Adam Hamaway, another hero of mine.
22:22And these classes, we thought we would continue by trying to seek placement for these medical students in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean.
22:34We sent emails to the deans of admission to 200 medical schools, 205, I believe it was.
22:41Five said yes, that they would consider it.
22:44Five.
22:46One of them only if they took two Jewish students as well.
22:49Right.
22:50Not that they all were paying attention to the politics.
22:57They didn't want to be perceived as pro-Palestinian.
23:01Everyone asked for us to do it on the QT.
23:05Don't make it public.
23:08We want to help you, but we can't.
23:13UNC, I live in the shadow of UNC and Duke, Wake Med, the Research Triangle, the Corners of the Triangle, all three wouldn't even consider it.
23:24I ask in significant part, not just because it's a medical establishment and it's an influential community, but also just for the simple fact that as a doctor, of course, you know, there's the oath.
23:39It's often referred to as the Hippocratic Oath.
23:42Sure.
23:43Doing no harm.
23:44So conceivably, you would think that this community or this establishment would be outraged by what's happening more than anyone.
23:51Right.
23:52And it depends on how you define doing no harm.
23:55If doing no harm means that you can close your eyes to global trauma, then they can feel comfortable with their Hippocratic Oath.
24:06But it doesn't in reality.
24:08Right.
24:10When your taxpayer dollars as a physician are buying 2,000 pound bombs that are meant to go through 20 feet of hardened concrete and granite and sandstone to blow up an Afghani hidden bunker in a mountain, and it's being dropped on a tent city with nothing but women and children and old people in it.
24:30Right.
24:31And then you see images of it because everybody has access to the images that they really want them.
24:36Right.
24:37Or they hear about them at least.
24:40What do they think their taxpayers are really doing?
24:44Are they really killing a selective single Hamas operative and not killing a bunch of, quote, innocent bystanders by the tens of thousands?
24:56The number 40,000 is bullshit.
24:58There's hundreds of thousands of people in the rubble alone.
25:01Hundreds of thousands.
25:03We all know the statistics in Turkey when there was an earthquake.
25:06It starts off with 300 people believed dead.
25:10What was the final number?
25:12It grew exponentially every single day.
25:15Right.
25:16When this rubble and as it did in Haiti, there was 180 people believed to be dead in Haiti.
25:23First broadcast went over 200,000.
25:26Right.
25:27Right.
25:28When they start excavating the rubble, if they ever do, the hundreds of millions of tons of concrete, because all the buildings were rebar and concrete, they're going to find hundreds of thousands of skeletons.
25:42Well, there's so many that we know are unaccounted for right now.
25:46The Lancet article already raised their 40,000 of accounted deaths to 118,000.
25:55Right.
25:56So it's going to be twice that minimum, twice that.
26:00And that's just deaths.
26:02That's not the morbidity.
26:03That's not the injuries.
26:05That's not the people who have psychiatric issues because of this.
26:10That's not the post-traumatic stress is alive and well and living in Gaza.
26:14And every kid, those that lived are missing body parts.
26:21How do they function?
26:22Right.
26:23Every person who had surgery guaranteed has an infection because we couldn't eradicate infection.
26:29Polio is a highly communicable disease.
26:32The sewage plants were destroyed by Israel.
26:34The electricity was shut off that powered them.
26:37Polio thrives in a sewage field environment.
26:40It's rainy season right now in Gaza.
26:43The sewage levels are rising.
26:45Polio is going to explode and it will grow exponentially.
26:49And without a ceasefire, you can't vaccinate the presumed 800,000 children under 10.
26:56It's way more than 2 million, right?
26:5950% of the population.
27:01That's an Israeli number, 800,000.
27:05The World Health Organization says it's millions and millions of kids.
27:09And think about it.
27:10The population is 50% children.
27:15There's 200 million people still living.
27:17It's 100 million children that need to be vaccinated.
27:20Those that do survive or that you saw survive, say from an explosion,
27:27what are the chances that they will continue to survive in the absence of the health care and the resources?
27:36Very little.
27:37We have no way of tracking the long-term health care of these people.
27:43An example.
27:46A nurse was shot in the operating room.
27:49His knee was blown across the room.
27:52And this is a story of tragedy which amplifies the war crimes committed by the IDF,
27:59but it also is pursuant to the point that we're making now about long-term health care.
28:05So this is a taxpaying, productive, highly skilled member of the Gazan Society,
28:11helping other Gazans who are injured.
28:13He's closing a wound in the operating room.
28:16During that closure, an Israeli soldier, I believe it was the Kuwaiti hospital, but I could be wrong,
28:21an IDF soldier comes in and orders him to leave the patient who's still asleep on the table.
28:29He refuses to.
28:31The nurse gets his knee shot and his tibia bone, the bone right below the knee,
28:36the bottom half of the knee, gets blown across the operating room.
28:40He's missing this much of his shin bone by the knee.
28:45He gets operated on that day himself to save his life and to save his leg.
28:50They fill the defect with medical plastic cement.
28:55His wounds can't be closed because he's missing a bunch of skin.
28:58He's admitted to the hospital, of course.
29:00The next day, the Israeli soldiers come and arrest him.
29:03They take him to Israel in a prison, blindfolded and handcuffed.
29:08He remained blindfolded and handcuffed for 45 days, fed a juice box every day,
29:14sometimes every other day, no solid food, zero wound care with a gaping open wound.
29:21He then gets dropped off at the border naked on the 45th day
29:26because they do their investigation, I suspect, but clearly he's not Hamas
29:30because they never would have let him go, right?
29:33So he crawls for three kilometers, blinded in one eye because there's a going away present.
29:39He gets a rifle butt in his right eye.
29:41It explodes in his head, right?
29:43His eye liquids are dripping down his face.
29:45He crawls in the dirt.
29:47Somebody finds him naked, brings him to our hospital.
29:50So a perfect example of starvation, torture, inappropriate arrest and detainment,
29:57denial of medical care, which is against our country's Leahy Act, right?
30:04All those high war crimes in just one person,
30:09and today I communicate with him almost every day.
30:12He's in Egypt, and he told me yesterday they want to amputate his leg.
30:17Well, that'll above the knee, which will take him out of the operating room,
30:21which means the societal investment into this guy to help hundreds of thousands of people in his lifetime is wasted.
30:29The morbidity that was cast upon this man, let alone the pain and the torture inflicted,
30:36but the loss to society of people who are now not taxpayers but tax consumers
30:42in a country that will never collect taxes again for a millennia,
30:46is devastating to the infrastructure of a society which, again, is the goal of the autocracy of Israel
30:56that my country and my taxpayers are supporting, quite illicitly and quite illegally.
31:06I feel there's so much that you've illuminated, but so much that's troubling.
31:13All we have to do is follow our own laws, and the war in Lebanon would have never started.
31:22The wars in Gaza would have stopped within weeks of its starting.
31:271980-ish, Ronald Reagan makes a call to Menachem Begin as he's bombing Beirut,
31:35just like we're doing now, and says, stop the bombing or I'll withhold my support.
31:42Within 20 minutes, the bombing in Beirut stops and never restarts.
31:49Biden can do the same thing. I voted for Biden because the alternative was worse.
31:55One telephone call can stop all wars.
31:59Israel cannot thrive without American taxpayers paid for bombs.
32:07That's all it would take.
32:10England is stopping their supply of bombs to Israel.
32:13Germany has not stopped.
32:15They still have this lingering guilt for killing Jews in World War II,
32:19but Germany will stop if America does.
32:23I mean, to that point, whether it's withholding funding for military supplies or what have you,
32:29do you have any final thoughts or observations that you might want to share?
32:35Notwithstanding, as I was just saying a moment ago,
32:39how troubling I feel this discussion is, if I'm to be totally candid,
32:43is there any, perhaps any hopeful words that are not naive?
32:48Sure. Two things.
32:50One, the American public and the Western public really needs to understand
32:54the difference between Zionism and Judaism, right?
32:59Israel is deliberately making them synonyms of each other,
33:04and they are highly not synonyms.
33:07Zionism was invented in the 1890s, 50 years before Israel became even a country.
33:16Yet today, it's evolved into a justification for the right-wing Israeli government
33:23to occupy Palestinian lands.
33:26It's simply a way of grabbing and taking over their land.
33:32That's all it is.
33:34It's not supporting Judaism.
33:36It's not designed to protect the life and livelihood of the Jew,
33:40like it was written for in the 1890s.
33:44What it's designed to do is to justify the acquisition of unarmed Palestinian lands.
33:52Granted, what Hamas did on October 7th was horrible.
33:57No person, none of the doctors who I went with,
34:00I don't know the person who could justify that.
34:03That's a horrible event.
34:05But if people would study what Gaza was like on October 6th,
34:09they'll realize that it was nothing but an open-air prison,
34:13and it remains so today,
34:15under the complete control of Israel,
34:17who controlled their imports and exports,
34:20the electromagnetic space, which is their telephone, TV, Internet.
34:25They controlled the waterway in the Mediterranean.
34:29If you were in Gaza in the last 10 years,
34:31and you went 100 yards out into the ocean,
34:34you got shot by a gunboat.
34:36So they can't even fish in their own waters,
34:39territorial waters as recognized by the UN.
34:42Now, Israel sold the gas and oil rights off of Gazan territory to BP and Shell, right?
34:50But the Gazans will never realize the profit from that, right?
34:55America needs to know that their tax dollars are supporting a political ideology
35:01and not a religion that is okay to be pro-Jewish and anti-Israeli.
35:08Indeed, the most dangerous place for a Jew to be in the world is in Israel, right?
35:15And us supporting Zionistic attitudes through the propaganda of the AIPIC
35:21and the monetary support of ultra-right-wing evangelicals in the United States,
35:26which actually donate more money than the AIPIC to our governors and legislatures.
35:34Had it not been for that political support,
35:37Israel would not have the funding or the legal support from the United States
35:42to continue with the genocide that they're doing right now.
35:47Yes. Thank you so much, Clark. I'm very grateful for this discussion.
35:52Of course, I wish you all the very best with your courageous work.