‘WAR MADE INVISIBLE’: GAZA, THE WAR ON TERROR, AND AMERICA’S CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY

Author Norman Solomon explains how images of the ongoing carnage in Gaza have exposed the horrors of war that the US worked to make invisible in the post-9/11 era.

War is a daily fixture of American life—the US military occupies at least 750 overseas bases, and it has executed military operations in nations around the globe over the past 20 years. But most Americans have remained unaware of this, thanks to a coordinated effort by politicians, corporate media, and the military-industrial complex to make the realities of American militarism invisible to the public. As author Norman Solomon writes in his new book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of the Military Machine, “America has been conditioned to accept ongoing wars without ever really knowing what they’re doing to people we’ll never see.” TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Solomon about his book, the political crisis that decades of invisible war have generated in US domestic politics, and how images of the ongoing carnage in Gaza have exposed the horrors of war that the US worked to make invisible in the post-9/11 era.

Norman Solomon is the cofounder of RootsAction.org, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and the author of numerous books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of the Military Machine.

Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Adam Coley

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell famously observed, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face.

“Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck, or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

“Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

Now, Orwell never could have imagined the ways the 21st century media ecosystem would enable powers narrators to deploy the thought-corrupting and reality-skewing force of language to instigate, justify, muddle or invisibilize the horrors perpetrated in our name.

But what he understood nearly a century ago about the relationship between power, language, and the visibility of atrocity has proven to be grimly timeless. Defending the indefensible is the proven modus operandi of the same consent manufacturing machine that propelled us into an unwinnable, illegal, and globally destabilizing war on terror over 20 years ago.

And, “Euphemism, question begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness,” have been the tried and tested tools of first resort, employed by corporate media and US political and military officials looking to justify Israel’s US-backed genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, its invasion of Lebanon, and its reckless, nihilistic campaign to embroil the Middle East in an all-out regional war.

In his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, the great Norman Solomon, co-founder of rootsaction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy writes, “America has been conditioned to accept ongoing wars without ever really knowing what they’re doing to people we’ll never see. Patterns of convenient silence and deceptive messaging are as necessary for perpetual war as the Pentagon’s bombs and missiles. Patterns so familiar that they’re apt to seem normal, even natural.

“But the uninformed consent of the governed is a perverse and hollow kind of consent. While short on genuine democracy, the process is long on fueling a constant state of war. To activate a more democratic process will require lifting the fog that obscures the actual dynamics of militarism far away and close at home.”

As we commemorate the grim anniversary of Oct. 7 and reflect on a year of what has been called the most documented genocide in history, as working people around the world struggle to get by and live their lives while bombs and guns obliterate our fellow human beings in Palestine, Ukraine, Lebanon, Sudan, and beyond. When it feels for many of us, like we’ve already seen too much: too much war, too much death, too much carnage, it is important to stop and ask ourselves, how much are we still not seeing? And has the increased visibility of war over the past year changed who we are and how we act to stop it?

To help us break this all down and to discuss his vital book, War Made Invisible, I’m honored to be joined by Norman Solomon himself.

Brother Norman, thank you so much for joining me today on The Real News Network. I really appreciate it.

Norman Solomon:  Well, thank you, Max, and you posed such a key question: What are we still not seeing? And we’re encouraged to have this sort of conceit that if we look at the mainline mainstream news and we pay attention to that, that somehow, for instance, we have a grasp, an understanding, intellectually and emotionally, what’s going on in Gaza. And that is basically preposterous, but the conceit that is encouraged compounds the deception. And the whole idea that we understand a war because we watch the news, we listen to it, we read it, is part of the propaganda system itself.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I already have explosions of thoughts in my head just hearing that opening salvo from you, and I really can’t recommend Norman’s book enough to everyone watching. Please, go read it, it is vital in these times.

And Norman, I want to build on that, because the paperback version of your book begins in the post-9/11 moment, a little over 20 years ago, and it concludes with an afterword on Gaza. I want those two points to frame our discussion today.

And I was wondering if you could take us there in those immediate months and years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and talk us through what you were seeing and would then write about in War Made Easy. The ways that the carnage was being invisibilized, the ways the public was being manipulated, and the relationship that we had to the war that was being perpetrated in our name.

Norman Solomon:  What’s going on now is really a continuation in various permutations of what began after 9/11. We had, essentially, a preemptive absolution for the US government because of the crime against humanity on 9/11, that whatever the United States did after that, in ostensible response, which was really just displaced rage and nationalism and militarism, that that was okay, that it was justified. And we’ve seen that echo today in terms of what the US and Israeli government are saying about the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, and now, increasingly, in Lebanon as well.

So for instance, at the end of 2001, you had then Defense Secretary — And it’s uppercase D, I wouldn’t say it’s about defense — But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he said, every death in Afghanistan, whether it is American, whether it is Afghan civilians, every single death is the result of and the culpability of Al-Qaeda. So that was like a blank, bloody check for whatever the US was to do was justified by citing the initial crime.

And I think this is a paradigm from that day to this. When you look at the numbers — And of course people are not numbers, but they are ways for us to understand magnitude — 3,000 deaths from the atrocity on 9/11. And then, according to the Brown University Cost of War project, the direct deaths as a result of the ensuing US so-called war on terror, 950,000 deaths, about half of them civilians. And then you go to the indirect deaths, and the Brown University study says 4.5 million deaths as a result of the US-led so-called war on terror.

So you look at 3,000 deaths, and then you look at direct close to one million, indirect adding up to more than four million. What is that about? What kind of culture, what kind of political system will engage in collective punishment of people who are guilty of breathing while Afghan, breathing while Iraqi? Or fast-forward more than two decades, what kind of political culture in the United States will continue to arm an Israeli government that is killing people for the transgression of breathing while Palestinian?

So this is a culture of mass murder that has emanated from or certainly got a huge boost from the response to 9/11. And here we are, what, more than two decades later, and the baseline continues to drop, so the standards continue to be degraded.

I recently saw an excerpt from a film by the wonderful folks at the Media Education Foundation from their film The Occupation of the American Mind, it’s been recirculated now online. And they chronicle the coverage of the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 1982, making possible the Israeli-backed right-wing massacre into the thousands of refugees at Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Beirut.

And to see the footage of the US networks in 1982 and compare it to what generally we have seen in 2024 in terms of the coverage of the current Israeli slaughter going on, it is shocking because, as inadequate as the coverage was in 1982 on the US networks, it was much better, it was more candid, it was more willing to call out Israel than what we’re getting now.

So I think a challenge as independent journalists, as progressive media institutions that The Real News Network and others are stepping onto to really step up to the challenge is to say, we don’t put up with this. We don’t accept a propaganda system that is consistent with what Martin Luther King Jr. called the madness of militarism. And Max, you referred to the consequences of the warfare state at home domestically, and it’s really what we know, what goes around comes around.

Dr. King referred to it, and these were his words, he said it was, “A demonic, destructive suction tube,” that was taking billions of dollars worth of resources for healthcare, education, housing, elderly care, neonatal care, you name it, and it was siphoning those resources to kill people in Vietnam.

And we’re talking now towards the end of 2024, and that dynamic is in full force, is ripping off. It is literally depriving lives of existence here at home while that funding, including most recently $20 billion with a B, dollars green-lighted by the White House, more weapons to Israel, that money, our tax dollars courtesy of US taxpayers, is paying to slaughter Palestinian people.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah, man. I mean, the marquee out in front of The Real News Network building currently reads the bar from Tupac Shakur, “They got money for wars but can’t feed the poor.” And I dream of the day when we can change the marquee and that slogan will no longer be relevant, but I feel we’re going to be waiting for a long time.

But Vietnam feels like a great example to bring up, not only because visibility and truth telling did play a critical role in public opinion on the war, the protest movement, so on and so forth, with images of My Lai Massacre and so on and so forth. Those images are burned into people’s minds. And there was also, of course, a draft. There were more tangible connections that people had to the machinery of war that, as you said, in the 21st century, those tangible connections have been severed, invisibilized, buried underground.

So, what was it about the 21st century US approach to war that made it so much easier to not only perpetrate but to do so at industrial scale the way that we have? What changed in the 21st century that enabled the US and other countries to make war so much easier?

Norman Solomon:  Well, really, the disconnection has increased over time. It’s been an evolution of distancing people in the United States from the wars that are perpetrated with their tax dollars in their names. It is so much easier for elites to start wars than for people then to stop them. And, certainly, during escalation of the Vietnam War, it was considered by those in power to be, per se, fairly easy to do.

And contrary to myth, it wasn’t the US media, the TV networks that stirred up the protests. It was the protests that changed the political climate that compelled, along with the longevity of the war and the failure to “win” that brought, kicking and screaming, reluctantly, the networks to show, actually, not very much of the carnage. But it was part of a tone that changed that ultimately had some political effect.

There’s much ballyhoo about when Walter Cronkite in 1968 said the war was in a stalemate and could not be won. What is often forgotten is that Cronkite never made a principled objection to the war. His objection was that it wasn’t being won.

And if you look at the paradigms of the last several decades, when there has been a war that the United States can wage routinely, I have to say, and my books have documented and many others have documented, based on falsehoods, if the wars can be “won quickly”, they remain popular.

And so in 1991 when the first President Bush launched a war on Iraq, and that war included the notorious, so-called horrible word, horrible phrase, “turkey shoot” of retreating Iraqi soldiers from Kuwait, literally gunned down in huge quantities from the air.

Bush had tremendous popularity. He had been in the low 50, 60% approval rating right before that because of the economy. Right after this triumph of the US war, what’s called the Gulf War in 1991, Bush’s popularity rating went up to 91%. Why? Because the war just took six weeks.

And this is embedded in US media and politics, and, unfortunately, to a large extent, in the public perception, if the war can be a triumph, it can be done early, not a lot of Americans die, then that’s considered to be a good thing. So the underlying militarism can vary in terms of how it plays out.

I think in also another aspect of the answer to your question, in this century, the immediate aftermath of 9/11, within a couple of years, the invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq. First, it was a lot of cheerleading. The bombing of Afghanistan that was launched in October of 2001 in the aftermath of 9/11, it’s stunning when you look at the Gallup polls.

90% of the US public supported the US attack on Afghanistan, 5% opposed, the other five said they weren’t sure. Well, that’s Soviet Union-style approval. That is like dictatorship, propaganda system approval levels, sky high.

And then in 2003, the US invasion and then war on Iraq essentially… Well, at least at that stage, we had media coverage. It didn’t mean it told us much about war at all, but there were US troops who were on TV, there were photographs, there were countless stories about them. They were fighting, they were doing a lot of killing, especially from the air, and some of them were dying. And the invisibility of US wars has been escalating as the number of US troops directly involved has been drastically decreasing.

And now more than ever, these are push button wars. The US is still engaged in dozens and dozens of different countries under the rubric of war on terror, counterinsurgency, a lot of it is secret, special ops going on.

And so we’re in a warfare state but, to a large extent, there’s virtually no media coverage of it except from independent, progressive, anti-war oriented media outlets. And the net result is that we have a huge military budget and it goes virtually unchallenged. I mean, the official, so-called Defense Department budget is now around $900 billion with a B a year, heading very close to $1 trillion with a T. That doesn’t include nuclear weapons, some veterans benefits as a result of trying to mitigate these terrible results of these wars.

Some of the invisibility layers include, for instance, I had to triple check this number because I was working on War Made Invisible, and I saw, oh, US soldiers who were involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when they came home to the US, how many of them had traumatic brain injury? 300,000. Can you imagine, 300,000 men and some women walking around the United States with traumatic brain injury? That’s an invisibility. All kinds of trauma.

In War Made Invisible, I talk about the much higher rates of spousal abuse and violence from veterans, especially those who have seen combat. The moral corrosion, what’s been called moral injury, involved.

And also, I would say in the current context — And I tried to get into this in the afterword of the paperback of War Made Invisible — The moral corrosion to live in a country that is subsidizing mass murder and genocide and not calling it that at all.

Max, when you were quoting that powerful excerpt from George Orwell, it made me remember as well, I think it was him that said that telling the truth can be, is actually, a subversive act.

And so our challenge now living in a warfare state based on lies, approving of and even glorifying slaughter by the US military and its allies. Now, in the Middle East most of all, of course, Israel, we have this challenge to subvert the warfare state. And we’re very much swimming upstream, but at the same time, while the mainstream is trying to cascade to tell us to be quiet, we know that, in history, we have been and are part of a tradition of Cassandras.

We’re linked to, in the last many decades, people, organizations, and movements who said the escalation of the Vietnam War is wrong. The response to 9/11 to create the so-called war on terror was insanity. What has now been done to Afghanistan because of the US war, what was done to Iraq, we tried to warn the elites.

And I think it’s important for us to augment our mission from we want to speak truth to power, which is, that’s okay, but power knows what they’re doing. It’s not a revelation to them, in most cases, what they’re doing. We also need to speak truth about power. So it’s not a vertical, it’s a horizontal, because that’s about education, agitation, organizing, and building movements.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I want to talk about the process of invisibilization and the role that the Obama years played in that. Because I think this, what you write so brilliantly about in your book, when I was reading it, I was thinking, this could apply to a lot of different political subjects that did not go away during the Obama era, but in many ways were just pushed under the radar.

So I feel like the Obama years, in terms of the political sentiments that were fomenting in this country, the underlying economic processes that were creating an even vaster gulf of inequality between the haves and have-nots, and also the reality of militarism, US-perpetrated militarism.

To say nothing of Obama being called the deporter -in-chief, not because he was doing the more visible workplace raids and home raids of the Bush era and previous eras, but because he was using “paper deportations”, the unseen methods, which were proved to be much more efficient at expelling undocumented people from this country.

So in so many ways, the Obama era was characterized by its ability, its deft ability to invisibilize so many of these nefarious forces.

And I wanted to ask if you could talk a bit about what that looked like on the side of the military-industrial complex. Because like I said, there was a visibility component to the war on terror. There was the shock and awe, there were boots on the ground, there were displays of military pride. Again, I remember, I was there. I was one of the guys who didn’t know shit from shit and was cheering it on at that time.

But then we really, in a few short years, really transition to drone warfare, like you said, the warfare of button clicking, and the invisibilization of the carnage. Talk us through a little more what was happening in that first decade of the 21st century that was creating a war machine that could make itself so thoroughly invisible to a public that was back here at home, none the wiser, seemingly?

Norman Solomon:  In foreign policy, President Obama made the so-called war on terror bipartisan. And there had been a negative energy from a lot of people who identified as Democrats, and certainly as progressives, that President George W. Bush had taken the country off the rails, that the invasion of Iraq, again, what so many anti-war progressive people had warned against, actually turned out to be a horrific disaster on virtually any level.

And so when Obama came in in early 2009, it was an opportunity to truly turn the page. Instead, he actually sent more troops into Afghanistan. He kept the war going in Iraq, and, ideologically and culturally, really pushed to say that militarism should be not only bipartisan, but considered to be identical with patriotism and standing with your country.

And he was part of a trend that is so sad. I’m old enough to remember when the Congressional Black Caucus was just inspiring. They had an annual alternative budget. We had Ron Dellums, we had Shirley Chisholm, we had John Conyers. These were visionaries who were in step with what Martin Luther King Jr. talked about. They were drum majors for peace. They really made the connections explicit between the militarism and spending for killing overseas, and the deprivation and oppression of poor people, the rainbow, and especially people of color disproportionately in this country.

There cropped up posters during the Obama presidency. And there’s a picture of him and Dr. King, and over Dr. King’s picture was, “I have a dream”, and over Barack Obama’s picture, “I have a drone”.

And I document in War Made Invisible how he just talked the usual nonsense. You would talk to the troops in Afghanistan, and gratuitously, it was unnecessarily politically or anywhere else. It normalized the idea that the best thing you can do is die for your country. It became some oratory, that I mentioned, that was macabre.

Imagine going to Bagram Air Base and telling the troops there that you may join the others who are buried in the special plot at Arlington Cemetery. You really have an opportunity to give for your country. This is a sort of a, dare I say necrophilia. It’s a worship of death in the ostensible service of your country when, actually, it’s in service of the military contractors.

And I talk about in the book, we have gotten so propagandized that often even those of us who oppose the militarism of the US government, we call it a defense budget. We talk about defense spending, a lowercase d, and that is part of the triumph. We’re giving ground to the militarism culture. Very little of the Pentagon budget has anything to do with defense. They can capitalize D, Defense Department, that doesn’t make it real in terms of it’s about defending this country.

And meanwhile, we have this tremendous climate emergency, and we have, as you’ve been referring to Max, this tremendous range of deprivation in our own country. It’s been said that the federal budget is a moral document, or could be, and right now we have a very immoral budget.

And so, as we speak, we have a crossroads of this election. In foreign policy, it’s hard to see very specific differences between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. But with domestic policy, there are huge differences because if Trump is elected and his coterie is brought in with fascistic politics, then the left, then progressives, then anti-war forces, we’ll be back on our heels. We’ll be defending the meager gains that have been achieved by progressives — Important gains, but definitely insufficient gains that have been achieved in the last 10, 20 years.

So I think we’re facing this paradox. No matter what, we should speak truthfully, and that means not pulling our verbal punches, that means challenging those in power, whoever they might be.

Maximillian Alvarez:  But over the past year, the visibility of carnage has been one of the most profound forces shaping people’s understanding of what’s happening right now. The social media images of Palestinian men, women, children, elderly people blown apart. Body parts, visceral carnage on people’s social media feeds.

I wanted to ask how the visibility of Israel’s war on Palestine over the past year, how, if at all, that has changed the political dynamics that you were writing about in 2006?

Norman Solomon:  Well, the fact that younger people, say under 40, are much more opposed to what Israel is doing than the older demographics speaks, in part, to just less years being propagandized about Israel and more willingness to just look at human rights as human rights, to be consistent about it. And of course, more orientation towards what they see in social media rather than in so-called legacy media.

I think that, ultimately, and this sort of connects to your previous point, is that if we’re going to face a fascist or neo-fascist regime, and I think it’s fair to say that’s what a Trump regime would look like if it comes in, then the capacity to respond to the horrors that we do know about, that we have seen through video and narratives and accounts, that capacity is to hit a brick wall. That’s one of, I think, the most worrying, to put mildly, specters ahead, that fork in the road.

Whereas if we flip it over, yes, the greater awareness — And this is a big change — The awareness of the need to support Palestinian rights and to challenge the terrible joint militarism of the US and the Israeli governments, that has begun to chip away at the foundation of automatic support of US for Israel.

We got a long way to go. I am absolutely, fully aware that that’s true. But if you’re dealing with a wall, which is the Republican Party, then you’re going to just keep hitting the wall. If you’re dealing with a wall that has some cracks in it and there’s a possibility to utilize what we have learned about the murderous qualities of the Israeli government vis-a-vis Palestinian people, the apartheid, the exclusionary policies, the ethnic cleansing, then are we going to have some space to work in, to organize in?

And as you know, Max, from reading War Made Invisible, I have no sparing of words for Joe Biden. I think his policies have been outrageous. I think he’s an accomplice to mass murder. There’s no question about that in terms of his role vis-a-vis Israel.

We don’t know what’s coming up, but we do know that we have to organize and we need to and want to organize in the best possible conditions to build further momentum for the movements that are really necessary.

Maximillian Alvarez:  In many ways, I remember looking one time when I was cleaning my kitchen, I found one of those potatoes that had been sitting there for a long time, and it had the sprouts grown out of it. And the sprouts had grown long, the potato had shriveled. And I stared at it thinking, that’s America, basically. We are an international war machine with a domestic government attached to it at this point, but it is increasingly a vestigial domestic body politic, it feels like.

And people feel that. The people I interview, working people, red states, blue states union, non-union. People are not stupid, they know and feel and see that, as we already mentioned. People devastated by Hurricane Helene in the same week that we’re learning about more military aid being sent to Israel. So that is creating a political rage that has nowhere to go.

And that’s where I wanted to end up with, which is where does this go if it is not channeled into a grassroots, coalitional movement, a people-led movement to bend power to our will? If people don’t have that outlet, then that rage turns sideways, it festers or it turns to nihilism.

And therein lies the question about the efficacy of visibility here in fighting the war machine. People have seen more of Israel’s war on Palestine and the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians than many had… It’s been more carnage that people have seen over the past year than they have perhaps in their whole lives that has propelled so many people to protest on the streets. Largest Palestine solidarity protests in the history of our country in DC multiple times in the past year. And yet, power persists with its current program under a Democratic administration. Republican administration is not going to change that, just look at their past policies.

So when people are both made aware by the increased visibility, their hearts are opened up to the human toll of this war because of the visibility of the carnage they’re seeing, but they are left a year later feeling like we’ve made no progress in changing the dynamics of power and influencing the people in power to stop this, then you have people who just give up. You have people who turn to figures like Trump in the hopes that he could be a big enough battering ram to shake something loose.

So I ask you, brother Norman Solomon, I want to give you the final word here. Has the increased visibility of war brought us closer to doing something to stop this suicidal path that we are currently on? And if it hasn’t, what else needs to happen to get us there?

Norman Solomon:  As you referred to, there’s tremendous rage, anger, and pain that a lot of people are feeling in a lot of dimensions. And that certainly applies to the Israeli war on Gaza. That pain, that rage that people feel, whether it’s their own economic situations or about US foreign policy, it can be a seedbed for all sorts of responses. It can be one for the fascistic approach and analysis such as it is from the Trump people, or it can be a genuine progressive response.

And I often think of a saying I heard from a musician, “You might feel like you’re getting lost, but you won’t if you know the blues.” And I think that applies to having a single standard of human rights and empathy for all people and holding to principles that are not just affirming for me and my loved ones, but people I don’t even know.

The phrase human rights, it might be sometimes abused, but I think it’s a very profound one, whether it’s access to housing and healthcare and education down the block or across the United States, or whether it’s people on other continents that we should hold to those principles. And I think that’s a pathway forward to invoke that, to talk about.

I was very impressed by the book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, and he ends up talking about that the messaging about the Middle East should definitely include emphasis on equality, that we oppose apartheid, that we oppose discrimination and relegation of people to second or third or fourth class citizenship, that we believe in a single standard of equality and human rights for everybody. And that’s sort of like, you might say, a Swiss Army knife. It applies in a lot of situations, home and abroad, many different places.

In terms of war, the visibility of war is not sufficient, but it’s necessary. And as I mentioned in the book, it’s possible for people to see on their TV screens or they’re scrolling images and video of war and horrors of war and conclude, well, that’s the way war is, or we gotta get it done quickly. Or, as Donald Trump said, we should help Israel “finish the job.”

That’s one conclusion because it doesn’t have a grounding in human rights, and it doesn’t have a context provided as to the suppression of some people over decades and centuries, even, in many cases.

So I would sum up a single standard of human rights, when we hold to it, when we insist on it, and we put a context — Not only insist that the suffering from war be made explicitly visible, but we put a historical context around it so that we don’t have the situation of simply empathy human rights stories, which, again, are necessary but insufficient to show the suffering, for instance, in Gaza.

Yes, it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient because we don’t want to go with victims without victimizers. They are victims, they’re human beings, just as precious as the people you’re going to see at the shopping center near where you live. That has to be made crystal clear.

What also has to be crystal clear is that they are not victims of an act of God or a hurricane or a flood that came as an act of nature. They are victims with victimizers. And in the case of Gaza, the victimizers are at the top of the governments of Israel and the United States.

Maximillian Alvarez:  So that is the great Norman Solomon, co-founder of rootsaction.org, and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and the author of the vital new book War Made Invisible. Norm, thank you so much for joining us today on The Real News Network, brother. I really, really appreciate it.

Norman Solomon:  Hey, thanks a lot, Max.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And to all of you watching, please, before you go, head on over to therealnews.com/donate, support our work so we can bring you more important coverage and conversations just like this, as well as all the vital on-the-ground documentary reporting that we have been publishing from Gaza, the West Bank, and around the world. Please support our work. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.