Yes, goddamnit, it’s genocide!: A conversation with Norman Solomon

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us again.

As we begin this conversation, let me give you the grim reality of what’s happening in Gaza as we tape this conversation. Over 58,000 Gazans, the vast majority of whom are non-combatants, women, and children, have been killed, 140,000 wounded, 370,000 buildings severely damaged, 79,000 destroyed altogether. And Gazans are being pushed into smaller and smaller corners of an already small land, no running water, illness spreading, and there’s mass starvation. As someone who over the last 57 years has been working for peace and a two-state solution or some form of dwelling together, this is absolutely devastating.

And as we see the right rising in the Holy Land, in Israel, it’s also taking hold here in the United States, and we’re on a precipice here in the good old United States of America where neofascism is rising. And our guest covers that deeply. He quotes Congressman Ro Khanna, who said, “What’s going on is chilling. They’re banning all international students from coming to Harvard. Think about that. All foreign students banned. They could do this in other universities. They have fired seven of the 18 directors of the NIH, totally dismantling future medical research in our country. It dismantled the FDA, firing people who approve new drugs. They’re systematically firing people at the FAA, the Arab Administration. They’re openly talking about defying the United States Supreme Court orders. J.D. Vance just said, justify the orders they’re calling the universities the enemy. This is very chilling.” That was Ro Khanna’s quote.

So today, we talk with Norman Solomon. Norman Solomon is the co-founder of rootsaction.org. He’s the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and the author of numerous books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning us to Death, and War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of the Military Machine. His website is www.normansolomon.com — That’s Solomon with all Os — And he has incredibly detailed well-written articles, and joins us now.

So great, Norman, it’s good to see you. Glad you’re here. Welcome.

Norman Solomon:

Thanks a lot, Marc.

Marc Steiner:

You’ve been doing — That’s what you do, you write. But you’ve been doing a lot of writing both about Israel-Palestine and about what’s going on with the Democrats, and it really feels as if, on both fronts, the state of the Democratic Party and the horrendous slaughter taking place in Gaza, that we are on a precipice, I think, in some ways deeper and more dangerous than ones that I’ve noticed in a long time.

Norman Solomon:

It’s hard to fathom. There are so many layers of it, to be in a country, the United States, that literally makes possible an ongoing genocide. It’s not a metaphor, it’s not an exaggeration. This is genocide going on. And yet, we’re living in that country that, under President Biden and now under President Trump, is literally enabling it, giving the weapons to make it all possible, and really the political support to enable it as well.

And then we have the domestic repression that, really, I’m in my mid-70s now, I can’t remember it ever being this bad, even in the depths of the Nixon administration and the crackdowns, the class war, the repression, the disappearances, the troops, I want to say, often with their faces covered, their identities. This is the kind of authoritarian regime that we would have nightmares for. It can’t happen here, but it is happening. So in terms of foreign policy, in terms of what’s happening in this country, it certainly is very upsetting if we’re paying attention. And at the same time, we know we can never give up. We have to organize and turn this around.

Marc Steiner:

So one of the things you just said, it took me back to my youth when I was a teenager as a civil rights worker in the South 16, 17, 18 years old. What we’re seeing now, to me, is akin to that, the terror that civil rights workers, the terror the Black community was under in the South is growing here in this country now, but in Israel it is a fact of life every day. 60,000 Palestinians killed so far in that teeny strip of land.

And I wonder how you begin to approach a couple of things, lemme just start here. We both come from the Jewish community. We both come from that world, and I grew up with people with numbers on their arms in my house. So how do we become those who oppressed us? It’s like the shift is turned. We’re doing exactly what was done to us. I guess that’s what I’ve been wrestling with and arguing, I spoke about it at a synagogue just the other week, for us to pay attention. How do we make us pay attention to that?

Norman Solomon:

This is so fundamental. What does “never again” mean?

Marc Steiner:

Right.

Norman Solomon:

Does it mean never again for all, any people or does it mean for our clan, our tribe, our self-identified ethnocentric group? And it’s a really basic question. And there’s also the matter of who we are and where the allegiances are tos so to speak, humanitys or some sort of self-identity.

It’s really stunning to me that so many progressives, whether Jewish or not, who were involved in supporting the Civil Rights Movement that took off in the ’60s, as you refer to, Marc, are now, unfortunately, in so many cases, winking, nodding, being silent about, or even supporting what, essentially, in the West Bank, for instance, is the Klan running everything, that is a clear parallel of people being terrorized, killed by extrajudicial means. And there’s no protection being provided, in that case, by the government, as a matter of fact, the Israeli government’s part of it.

And then as, you refer to, the horrendous slaughter going on daily in Gaza, and pretty soon it’s going to be the two-year mark, while there are some really terrible things going on in many parts of the world, the reality is that genocide is a very clearly internationally defined definition. So many people grew up with the belief, the understanding that that’s actually the worst possible thing that could go on, and yet it is going on. So that’s one just beyond upsetting reality.

And parallel to that and intertwined is that it is the United States of America that makes it all possible. And so, when you live in that United States of America, that constantly gives us the question: who the hell are we? And I know as somebody growing up in the United States in the ’50s and ’60s, I was very frightened by watching The Diary of Anne Frank. And that whole question really hovered, and sometimes it was explicit in the ’50s, in the ’60s and beyond: How could the German people stand by and allow that to happen?

And I got more than a glimmer of that during the escalation of the Vietnam War because there was so much acceptance, support, or just looking the other way, and more than 3 million people died in Vietnam as a result of that active and passive support. And so that question is still with us here in the summer of 2025: How could people allow genocide to happen when “their own government” is doing it?

Marc Steiner:

I want to jump on this one thing I think it’s important to talk about for a moment, because there’s a lot of pushback on the use of the word “genocide” when it comes to what’s going on in Gaza at the moment. Let’s talk about how we, how you define that word and why it’s being used in Gaza. People could say genocide is the Holocaust, genocide was what happened in Cambodia, genocide is what this country did to the Indigenous people. Talk about the use of that word in terms of Gaza, because there’s a lot of confusion and anger around the use of that word.

Norman Solomon:

There is, and I find it notable that a lot of politicians and others and activists who routinely, over the years and decades, have cited reports from Amnesty International, from Human Rights Watch, as authoritative, as telling us what was going on in Africa or elsewhere in the world, and citing, yeah, Amnesty International has said this or that, or Human Rights Watch. last December, both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued hundreds of pages reports definitively, unequivocally saying that what Israel was doing in Gaza, and now is continuing to do, is genocide. There was no watering it down, there was no equivocation. So we have these gold standard human rights global organizations saying it without question. And part of, as I read about it and read the scholars part of it is the intent are the forces, the governments, the authorities intentionally trying to make it, for instance, very difficult or impossible for new births to take place, which is certainly the case in Gaza.

The destruction of all the hospitals, the filtering out and blocking of humanitarian aid, medicine, food, nutrition, water and so forth. And also polar in part, trying to destroy the culture and ethnic reality of a particular group. All of that falls directly in line with what Israel’s been doing. There are so many smoking guns in terms of what has been said by Israeli officials for almost two years now. This is what they’re doing. And unfortunately, Israeli society is mostly there. Hebrew University last month released the results of a poll among Jewish Israelis and found that upwards of 60%, almost two thirds said that they believe there are no innocence in Gaza. There are no innocent people in Gaza whatsoever. And I had to think of some interviews that were done, some of the most heinous, top Nazi criminals who were part of inflicting the Holocaust on Jews, on gays, on gypsies,

Marc Steiner:

Gypsies.

Norman Solomon:

And they were asked there children, you were sentencing to death in those camps. And some of the response was, yeah, but they would’ve grown up to be adult Jews or gypsies or homosexuals or communists, and we couldn’t have that. There’s a lot of resonance and echoing of that attitude among not just the right wing leadership of the Israeli government, but among the majority of the population. And one thing I’ve been thinking about Mark, is that at this point, Israeli society is a genocidal society, and the United States in terms of polling is not in favor of that genocide, but for almost two years now and up through the present moment, the US government is a genocidal government because it’s making all this possible.

Marc Steiner:

So there may not be a connection to what I’m saying with there may be, I’m curious, your thoughts. You’re seeing an impotent democratic party with no sea muscle or strength intellectually or politically just stand up to this or anything else and kind of going along with it all and not the entire group. I mean, there’s a growing strong progressive wing inside the Democratic party that are standing up. So how does that political dynamic play into this moment

Norman Solomon:

Really important? Because for one thing, if the Democratic party had been truly lowercase d Democratic and had responded to the viewpoints about Gaza during the first months of the war on Gaza, back when Biden was still running for president and then Kamala Harris, then the position at the top of the Democratic Party would’ve been for a cutoff of military aid. As long as the slaughter continued in Gaza, they would’ve said no, an arms embargo on Israel. The polling was clear by early of last year, but because the party is under a hammerlock of the pro-Israel, right or wrong forces, corporate forces and so forth, it basically countermanded and ignored what the public wanted, including the total US public, but certainly even more so among Democrats. So when you have a party that doesn’t even pay attention to its base, is afraid of its base, which cares more about the big donors, not the small donors, but the big ones, and also the punditocracy, which has been callous and with few exceptions willing to ratify or at least accept this genocide going on in Gaza, then you have a party that’s an elitist party at the top.

Marc Steiner:

As you were saying that, one of the things I thought about because as a bumper sticker I made some 40, 50 years ago when I used to make them called existence is contradiction. And I raise that because when we say the power of the Israeli lobby, the pro Zionist world, while it’s real, it also raises the spec of antisemitism, which is always bubbling below the surface just like racism. It’s always bubbling below the surface. So I’m curious in the midst of our struggles, I mean there was just a huge convention here in Baltimore with a lot of young Jewish people who were standing up to this, which was really heartening. But the question is how do you respond to that? How do you respond to the danger of antisemitism that could kind of leap out at any moment and what we’re facing and how to say we have to stop Israel from committing the slaughter against Palestinians.

Norman Solomon:

The strongest force for antisemitism is the Israeli government, and specifically in the last year and three quarters, the Israeli war on people in Gaza. And so there’s this ultimate, in many ways, big life scam that Zionism has more intensely propagated in the world. And that is the scam, is that the Israeli government equals Judaism. And once you buy that absurdity, then as Volter says, when you buy into an absurdity, any atrocity becomes possible because opposition to the Israeli government gets equated with antisemitism. And we’ve seen that with a vengeance in the last more than a year, the attacks on universities, the attacks on basically free speech where you criticize Israel, you do it fundamentally. You dare to say that the Israeli project has been suppressing the rights of Palestinian people, which is clearly true since the late 1940s. And then you get branded as antisemitic. And I think you’re referring to what I read about was a wonderful conference in Baltimore not long ago of a Jewish voice for peace.

Marc Steiner:

Yes.

Norman Solomon:

And here’s thousands and thousands of Jewish activists who’ve been doing civil disobedience and protesting the war on Gaza for almost two years now, and they’re accused of being anti-Semitic. And that really takes the mask off of the propaganda process that the Israeli government and its allies have been relying on for decades. The reality is that all sorts of bigotry is deadly against Jews, against Muslims, against all sorts of people around the world. So it’s really all of one cloth in a sense. We fight against that kind of

Marc Steiner:

Bigotry. One of the pieces I was reading today that you wrote, you’ve written so much really good stuff that we’ll be linking to here on the page. You can just go through it all. It’s worth taking time with it. But you’re right about Congressman Connor and about the neo fascism bubbling up right here and how it’s really connected, I think, to what’s happening in Israel. And you wrote, they’re banning all international students from coming to Harvard. Seven of the 18 directors of the NIH have been fired, dismantling medical research, dismantling the FDA, firing people to approve new drugs, firing people in the FAA, and then you have a right wing supreme court. And so moving to the states for a moment, that analysis is you, right? Where does that lead us? Where does that take us? What do you think we’re facing?

Norman Solomon:

We’re facing tremendous repression and an effort to stamp out the opposition to the bigotry, to the rule of the billionaires. And we’re facing autocracy. It’s a cult led by Trump. The stakes could not be higher in terms of what has survived and been incubated as democratic processes in this country. We have structures that, it may sound like a cliche, but it’s true. People died for the right to vote. People died for some ways that the voices and opinions and desires of people at the grassroots could overwhelm the power of the elites. I ran across a quote from the first chief justice of the US Supreme Court, John Jay, who said that people who own the country should run it. And that’s what we’re seeing in New York City right now. The rage ha hath no fury, like the corporate power scorned. I

Speaker 3:

Like that

Norman Solomon:

We have people like Michael Bloomberg and other gazillionaires, and they can’t fathom the idea that Ani who would challenge the power of the big banks and the real estate interests and so forth to run the city that they largely own. It’s just unfathomable to those who are in power that you could actually have democratic socialism. And on the one hand, we can say, well, as is true with foreign policy, there’s a ruling class and they’ve always, they’re the descendants of a long centuries long process of imperial adventure and enforced by military and economic power. So that’s who they are. At the same time, there’s a huge split in the ruling class, especially domestically. And while the Democratic and Republican parties are so often just in lockstep in foreign policy, when you get to domestic policy now more than ever, it is a huge difference. And there’s a sort of a fringe demagoguery that we hear sometimes on the left that there’s no significant difference between the Democratic and Republican party.

So tell that to a young woman in Texas who wants to get an abortion, tell it to people who are being disappeared. Just look at the dozens of Supreme Court decisions just in the last few months. And you see that the justices who have been appointed by Republicans are bringing the hammer down on the most basic aspects of civil liberties. So there is a huge, huge difference. And I think part of our challenge is to recognize, and you referred to this I think a few minutes earlier with different words, but it’s too bad. It sounds sort of stodgy and stuffy and academic, but dialectics that truths exist in contradiction to each other. And it’s our challenge to understand in this moment what those contradictions portend not only for the future that we can anticipate, but what the hell we should do. So while we fight against the US militarism that has so many terrible results overseas, and of course it rebounds here as Martin Luther King Jr.

Said what he called the demonic destructive suction tube. A military spending destroys lives here at home by diverting resources. The fact is that here in the United States, we have a fascistic party. It’s called the Republican Party, and we have the imperative to defeat it. And while ultimately electoral work is a subset of social movements, it really is crucial who is sitting in the White House, who is running the Congress, whose speaker of the house, who’s majority leader in the Senate. And it’s ironic when we hear people who are into protesting who say, it doesn’t really matter, or we don’t want to put energy into electoral results when everything we are demanding ultimately has to be implemented through government action or is being set aside and destroyed through government inaction. So it’s like walking on both legs. We have to fight for a strong social movement and build it. And at the same time, we need this electoral work. And concretely, that means we need to take control of the Congress away from Republicans next year.

Marc Steiner:

I can hear a lot of people listening to our conversation groaning when they hear that because of the lack of faith in Democrats. And I think about historically where we are now on two levels. If you look at what happened in Germany and Italy in the 1930s and how the neo fascists who were a minority in both countries, the fascists took over, they won the election, they took over the country, and they turned everything around, which is in some ways what’s happening before our eyes. And we’re not making that comparison just like the fascists because of the colonial heritage have taken over what’s called Israel. I mean, and that dynamic is at play. So where do you see the forces coming together to counter that?

Norman Solomon:

I think, yeah, we needed a united front. We needed a united front against the Republican party in terms of not only these terrible things being done daily that we see in the news from the Trump regime and from the Republican Congress, but also united front to defeat them in elections. And I think in terms of literature, magical thinking can be wonderful, but in politics, we should be really against magical thinking.

Speaker 3:

We

Norman Solomon:

Should really have our feet on the ground. And there is no way to take the Congress away from Republicans next year except through Democratic party candidates. That is just the reality, the idea that Democrats are inherently the epitome of evil. Well tell it to Ilhan Omar, tell it to Rashida Lib. These are wonderful people who would not be in Congress if they had run on any line other than the Democratic party line. So we have this challenge to keep fighting.

Marc Steiner:

I was thinking about what’s happening Israel Palestine and the fact that during the sixties in the Civil Rights Movement, which I was a part of, 60 to 70% of all the white people in the movement and giving their lives sometimes were Jews down south. And I think that we have to harken in some ways back to our labor and civil rights roots to make a battle, to save the future. I think we are on that precipice.

Norman Solomon:

We’re on a precipice that many people have already been pulled over and have been thrown over and are being destroyed as we speak. And it goes to so many questions of identity and what we believe in and what kind of society we can create. One of the notable things to me, which gets very little publicity is that, okay, you have what, 7 million Jews in this country, increasingly, especially the younger ones, identify as anti Zionist, right? A large proportion of Jews in this country surveyed are saying that they believe the Israeli government is committing genocide. And then the largest Christian Zionist organization in this country has 10 million members, way larger. So there’s this terrible bargain that has been struck because many of those Christian Zionists don’t like Jews. Some of them are virulently antisemitic, but they have a biblical narrative that says, well, the Jews in Israel and what’s called Israel is sort of a stepping stone to where they’re headed in terms of their holy journey.

Marc Steiner:

They want us dead so they can take over. Yeah,

Norman Solomon:

It’s very cynical, but very sincere. And that kind of alliance reminds me of what happened took shape 20 and 30 years ago where you had corporate power, which going way back to the 1970s, the infamous Lewis Powell memo that said, Hey, we have to really organize as right wingers to crush progressives to make sure that the rich and the corporate people keep running the country. Don’t let these black people have more power. And so that was really a blueprint that was effectively followed. And then you had the rise of the so-called moral majority. You had Jerry Falwell and people who were evangelical right-wing Christians. They opposed women’s rights, they opposed abortion rights. And those two tendencies that became so strong during the 1970s and eighties, they struck a bargain. And I think that the Wall Street people, the corporate forces, they didn’t particularly care about abortion rights one way or the other, or women’s rights.

What they cared about is maximizing profits, which is what they always care about, and not have labor unions or others get in the way. And then meanwhile, I think a lot of the hardcore evangelical Christians, they didn’t really care about Wall Street one way or the other, but they struck this tremendously powerful deal. And we’ve seen the results. Now we have this reality that a new configuration of alliances is in place. The Republican Party has its own splits, but there we are. And that’s I think we come back to again and again, the need for front, and this is I think, a form of dialectics. There are some people in that necessarily united front that I hope will gain more and more power and defeat Republicans next year. Some of we’re going to find odious and we need to keep fighting their militarism and their class war from the top down because the only antidote to that, so to speak, is class war that would be more effective from the bottom up for working people, for wannabe working people, for children, for the elderly. That’s the battle that needs to be joined. One of the first steps is you defeat the neo fascists that are already in power. I’ve heard of a parable attributed to Malcolm X that if you’re facing somebody who’s pointing a gun at you and you’re also facing somebody who’s trying to poison you, the first step is to knock the gun out of the hand. Who’s pointing the gun at you? We’re facing a gun right now, and it’s the fascistic Republican party.

Marc Steiner:

We have to have many more conversations. I think what you just outlined on both fronts, what’s happening in Israel Palestine at this moment and the rise of neo fascism here are really important. And I think you eloquently put it in a lot of your writing that we’ll be linking to, so people who can check out what you’re saying, because I think they need to read it. And I think that you raise the issue here, which we can come back to at another time, which is part of the root of this, which is the Powell memo that people have forgotten about. And I remember doing shows about that years back. And I think it’s important to understand this history, to understand what we face and how we organized the fight against it. And so I just want to thank you, Norman, for being here today, but also for all the work you’ve done and the writing you’ve done and the analysis you give us, it’s really important. I look forward to wrestling with more ideas with you very soon.

Norman Solomon:

Hey, thanks a lot, mark. And thanks for the Mark Steiner show and the Real News Network.

Marc Steiner:

We’re all in this together.

Norman Solomon:

Yeah,

Marc Steiner:

Once again, let me thank Norman Solomon for joining us today, and we’ll link to his work. You can Google it at www.norissmonsolmon.com. And that’s Solomon with o’s. And thanks to David Hebdon for running the program today, and our audio editor Steven Frank for working his magic Roset Ali for producing the Mark Steiner show and the tireless Keller Ra for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here through Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at m ss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Norman Solomon for joining us today. But for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Dan Val, keep listening and take care.