Good morning to the UK column, listeners.
Well, actually, it's an early good morning.
It's reasonably early. It's 8:00 here.
I'm in a very dark, rainy Plymouth.
It's still pretty dark outside. It's raining very heavily.
Poppy the dog took a little look outside the door, decided that
she didn't need to go out. So I'm here to do a little bit
of work from home. Today's a special day because
I've got a very special guest, a lady, well, a woman who's agreed
to speak to me under my Gutsy Women series.
And I'm really pleased to have Eva Bartlett with me this
morning. And Eva, you're there in Moscow.
Thank you for joining me. What's the weather like?
Thank you so much, Brian, for your kind introduction and it's
really an honor to speak with you.
I admire the work you've done over the years.
So thank you for, for doing this and for thinking to include me
as a gutsy woman. So I'm in Moscow, oblast the
countryside, I'm in a lovely, serene area.
It's it's it's very quiet. It's my, I love the city.
It's a beautiful city but I prefer to live in the
countryside with my two dogs, which I adopted after moving to
Moscow and we've had beautiful snow.
In fact you'd think I had cross country skis before now.
I I did as a teenager back in Ontario.
But the other day I finally went and bought myself a pair of
cross country skis, my third year in Russia, and decided I'd
finally get back on the snow because it's just been
absolutely picturesque and gorgeous.
It's it's a bit warmer today so I'll have to wait for the next
snowfall, but when it happens I'll be out there.
Yeah, excellent. Well, I've never been to Russia.
I've always found it a fascinating country.
When I was doing my military time in the UK many, many years
ago, I wasn't allowed to go. I wasn't allowed to go into the
Warsaw Pact areas or Russia. That was all due to security
clearances, but it was pretty strict at that time.
So Russia's the place I've never been to, but it's a fascinating.
Clearly it's a fascinating country and in my mind, well,
maybe not surprisingly, I'm always fascinated when I see the
pictures with a really heavy frost and snow, and particularly
some of those iconic buildings. First question, sorry, how do
you get from, how did you get from Ontario to living in
Moscow? I know this really takes you
through a big chunk of your life, but you you're there
living, living in Moscow, you're working as a journalist, you're
covering some really troubled spots in the world and you're
putting yourself at great risk. How did that journey start?
Just take us back a little bit to, yeah.
I'll I'll take you back a little bit further given that I was
born in Michigan in the US. My my parents were musicians and
by the time I was around three 3 1/2, they decided they wanted to
move to Canada. So we did.
We moved to Western Canada. They taught at a university in
British Columbia for a couple of years and then we moved to
Winnipeg, MB, where I lived for five years.
So you know, this icy, cold, snowy weather you're describing,
It's something I'm very familiar with from my childhood, from
Winnipeg and then Ontario. We moved to Ontario, a very
small town in Ontario when I was 10.
And that's where I spent the next, you know, well off and on
until 2015 when we moved to the family home and my mother to a
different city in Ontario. But when I was, I forgot now.
So basically when I went to high school in Ontario, we were the
only province to have 13 grades. Every other province had 12
grades. And our 13th grade was
supposedly to prepare us for university.
And in in the 12 and 13 years, a lot of the students took what we
called spares and they were in theory supposed to be for
studying. But most people played cards in
the cafeteria. I didn't take any spares.
I was kind of a nerdy high school student.
I did well in school. I'm not a critical thinker by
any means. I just.
I got decent, good grades. I was in the band, in the choir,
on the basketball team. It was generally a good high
school experience. But I did.
I I went through my 13th year quickly so I finished one
semester early and around that time my family decided to have a
my mom's side of the family's Irish.
They decided to have a meet up in Ireland and I thought that
would be cool. So I started working to save
money to go there and by the time I finally did make it there
the the family meet up had already come and gone.
This is all this is all a lead up to tell you how, in a very
roundabout way, how I actually got involved in anything
political. I I did make it to Ireland.
I ended up working there on Inishmore Island, if you know
that side of western Ireland, beautiful Gaelic area.
And then I started hitchhiking around the country and
volunteering on farms. And all that to say, in high
school I thought I would be a marine biologist, but I really
sucked at science. I really had to work hard to get
decent grades at science and I had a very romantic vision of,
you know, what I thought I would do.
So then I came back to Canada after 1/2 year in Ireland
roughly. Didn't know what to do with
myself. I already played piano.
As I mentioned my parents were musicians.
I was also musical, so that's what I did.
I went to school on the East Coast, I studied.
I was going to do a degree in music, but then after a year in
my third year of university, I I studied in Strasbourg, France on
a French exchange program. And so I altered my degree
slightly and ended up with a major in music and minor in
French. Nothing to do with politics,
nothing to do with journalism. And I say that both to be clear
about how I came to journalism. But also I'm actually thankful
in a sense because I I am a product of the Western education
system. I mentioned I wasn't a critical
thinker. We're not really encouraged to
think critically, at least not where I went to school.
And I would say that's a general, a general fact, but
also I didn't absorb any of the the nonsense history and and
political stuff we would have been taught in high school.
I just wasn't interested. So I to me, that's a blessing
because when I finally, in my late 20s, did start becoming
politically active, the first issue being Palestine, I simply
was naive. I simply had no information
whatsoever. And so the information I was
taking in, of course, you know, you do have to parse.
Maybe I was taking in incorrect information, but I see in in, in
hindsight what I was, what I was reading and and viewing on
Palestine in my late 20s. It was correct and it was what
motivated motivated me to finally to go to Palestine,
which I did in May 2007. I went there on my own.
I went via Jordan on my own dime, my own dollar, and this is
after I had spent some years in South Korea teaching English and
also just travelling very simply in Southeast Asia.
So I had started to wake up to the world.
And that's when I started looking at news and coming
across the issue of Palestine, which when I first saw anything
to do with it and heard anything to do with it, I was, like I
said, naive. I didn't know anything about it.
And when I started watching videos, for example during the
second intifada of Israeli soldiers methodically breaking
arms of Palestinian farmers, this is part of their quashing
of the Palestinian uprising, was just to oppress the entire
people as much as possible. I would.
I remember sitting at my computer and just sobbing and
sobbing and sobbing and thinking, you know, very
naively, how can this be happening?
How can the world be like this and also deciding that at some
point I had to go and see for myself and I don't know why, but
that's always been kind of a drive in me to the places I have
been reporting on to actually over there and and talk to
people and see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears.
Even if if I can just just come in there, if I may, key question
you, you say you were looking at material that was talking about
Palestine. Since you're a journalist, where
where did you go to find at that time?
Where did you go to find information about Palestine?
So I will, I will answer this with a caveat because whereas
Democracy Now at the time was reporting in my opinion.
Well, I mean, I don't remember all the nuances of their
reporting at the time, but I was an avid listener to Democracy
Now at the time. This is in the early 2000s.
I was still living in South Korea and every day I would
TuneIn to Democracy Now and there was a lot of coverage of
what was happening in Palestine and from there from whatever
links they had. I don't honestly remember the
other sites I was looking at. I I did at some point come
across the International Solidarity Movement, which I
eventually would join in 2007 in in the West Bank and later in
Gaza. But I have to say, yeah,
Democracy Now was the 1st place I was I I started hearing about
it. And the reason I give this
caveat is that whereas you know whatever reporting they did at
the time did awaken me to the issue of, you know, issues of
what was happening in Palestine. They're later reporting for
example, on Syria or on Libya or on pretty much anything to do
with Russia. I don't, I don't even know their
really their take on Ukraine and Russia.
I can imagine what it is. But because they're later
reporting basically aligned with Western or NATO narratives on
critical issues. So that was, you know, in all
honesty that's where I first started hearing about things And
then the ISM. I don't know if your listeners
are aware, but in in summary, it's a I'm no longer affiliated
with them, but I do respect the concept of what ISM volunteers
were doing. Basically internationals from
all over the world, all faiths, all ages going for however long
they can go to to Palestine. Most area, most of the time it's
it's in the West Bank because Gaza is impossible to reach.
I will tell you how I got to Gaza, but most of the time it's
the West Bank. And they they go and they bear
witness to the various aspects of the Israeli occupation.
And they put out, you know, to the best of their abilities.
They put out journalistic reports and what they're seeing,
whether it's Israeli invasions or the attacks of the illegal
Israeli colonists on Palestinian civilians, etcetera, etcetera.
So that's also one of the prime sources.
I was getting information and that's when I said I decided I
would go to Palestine. It was because I'd seen the
reports of such activists. OK.
So, so your journey started there in 2000 and 2007 and
you've already, you've already told us a lot of interesting
things there because you've you've had a lot of experience,
you're describing a lot of experience, you've lived in
different countries, you've had different parts to your
education and then ultimately you've you've moved abroad.
So I'm smiling to myself because I'm thinking yes, this sounds
like the background of somebody who wasn't going to accept the
the the norm was was going to going to get in amongst it.
So so 2007 you you took the decision to go to Palestine.
So tell us how, how did that actually happen and how did you
get into the country? So let's see, 2007.
I'm just trying to remember it was my own, my own funding.
I would have been working various, you know, simple jobs
like I'd worked as a waitress back then.
I wasn't writing anything. I wasn't publishing anything.
And in journalistically, I had been helping a journalist from
Gaza who I'd met in Washington DC I'd been helping him with
editing nuances in English language.
So doing that I was, I was learning some journalistic
concepts. But again, that was just my own
initiative. When I went to the West Bank, I
went to Jordan, to Amman, Jordan.
I spent a few days there and then I crossed over the Allenby
Bridge and was granted a three month visa.
Now I I state that when I went there, I anticipated not being
allowed in because I had spoken with other international
activists and I'd read the accounts of the many being
banned, entry or deported because it was generally
understood that Israel didn't want people there to witness
what was happening, what they're doing, the Israeli forces, the
the crimes of the occupation. I went there anticipating it
wouldn't be allowed in. My my my feeling is that I
looked like enough of a young backpacker tourist that I was
allowed in. I was granted a three month visa
for the first two or three weeks.
I had already made contact with a group called Combatants for
Peace that comprised Palestinians and Israelis who in
some capacity had taken part in fighting.
So the Israelis would have been for the most part.
If I recall, they were members of the Israeli forces, which
every Israeli citizen has to be in any case.
And Palestinians. It could be something as little
as throwing a rock to being active combatants, Palestinian
resistance fighters, and now I'm no longer in touch with them.
But I thought it would be interesting to start my
experience in Palestine by by hearing their sides, hearing the
Palestinian side, hearing Israeli sides as much as I
could, before then going on to join the international
solidarity movement, which I decided that I really wanted to
do because I figured that I would see what I've been reading
about and that I could write about it.
So again, I don't remember exactly how long I joined
meetings with this Combatants for Peace, but I will say one
interesting thing that I do remember.
I don't remember the man's name but I remember going with this
group to some Israeli neighborhood and the a former
Israeli soldier spoke about his awakening moment.
He basically said something like he was ready to kill.
I don't remember the number if it was 100,000 or 100 thousands,
hundreds of thousands. Arabs they they he wouldn't say
Palestinians just Arabs for the safety of his country.
And again paraphrasing that's effectively what he said and
then he had his aha awakening moment.
These aren't just animals or people that I can kill, you
know, without remorse. They're actually people.
When he had his gun pointed at a child who was roughly the same
age as his own kid, and that's what jolted him awake as he
said. And from that moment on, he
realized, you know, he had been heavily propagandized.
He I don't remember his whole evolution, but there's there's
many such stories on the Breaking the Silence website of
former Israeli soldiers and things, even acts of
monstrosities or certainly violence, they participated in
and you know felt the need to speak out about.
So that was my my experience like one of my experiences with
this group and then I I went and I had non violence training with
the ISM cause the whole principle of the ISM.
Now I'm again paraphrasing, I don't want to speak on their
behalf but basically it is they go to places where there is
violence. They they violence primarily
being from the Israeli army or illegal colonists.
They document they don't fight back.
So if if a colonist is attacking us, we don't fight back we turn
away. So that was one of the non
violence techniques was just turning your shoulder away,
walking away if need be. OK, I think there's a line where
you could protect yourself if you're absolutely being beaten,
which many international activists have been.
But anyway, there were a a a couple of two or three days of
non violence training. And then we basically as
activists lived in different areas of the West Bank.
I spent a couple of weeks in Hebron or the Arabic Khalil.
I spent a lot of time in Nablus. I spent off and on months living
in tents of Palestinians in an area called Soussia, South of
Hebron. These Palestinians had been
displaced from their homes in the 80s, I think it was 80s or
90s by an Israeli closed military zone order, so they've
been expelled from their homes. Their homes had been old stone
homes, even cave homes, and they were forced to live like
hundreds of meters away in ramshackle tents, always at risk
of being demolished by the Israeli military.
Again under these pretexts like you don't have the right to be
here and also being attacked by Israeli colonists, nearby
colonies. So we would sleep in the tents
to document when these things happened when and and and hoping
to deter such attacks. Now there are Israeli groups,
rights groups. One I remember is to Ayush.
I think it was TAYUSH and they would go down there and document
this, this kind of thing quite a bit.
They would bring internationals, Israeli activists there to see
it as well. But at the time, we were in
nationals sleeping around the clock in these tents.
So that was very, I don't know, it was harsh to see.
And it was in that area that I saw Israeli colonists literally
taking over Palestinian land. They basically aggressed.
They'd beaten and aggressed the older Palestinian farmers that
had deeds to land to such an extent that farmers were afraid
to go on their land because they'd be beaten again and
nobody would protect them. The Israeli police won't protect
them, the military won't protect them.
They were trying to get the rights to their land back to the
Israeli legal system. And as they did that, the
colonists were given permission. I don't remember, you know, the
bodies that do this, but they were allowed to work on the
land, and they were doing so. They had fenced it off.
They planted grapevines, and they were bragging about the
money they were going to earn by by stealing that land
unabashedly. And this kind of thing is
happening all the time. But, you know, that's one
instance I saw with my own eyes over the course of several
weeks. We spent time in villages, for
example, around Nablus, that would come under Israeli raids
and they would announce what they called curfews, which meant
if you set foot on the street as a Palestinian, you could be
arrested or shot. And the curfews.
It was pretty terrifying. When the Israeli military would
blast into the town, particularly at night, it was
they'd have their sirens blaring their their their announcements
blaring that they'd often fire tear gas or shoot up at, shoot
at homes. They'd barge into homes and
abduct Palestinians under you know some promise of
self-defense or these people had committed some alleged crime.
And as I would see and if you follow Palestine in closely at
all in in many case in in what's happening in Gaza now is a
perfect example. The Israeli side, the Israeli
authorities can allege something they never have to provide any
sort of evidence. And then they can commit heinous
crimes, whether it's abducting people from their homes, killing
people in their homes, bulldozing homes or destroying
homes by other means. Or in the case of Gaza, as we're
seeing plain out now, destroying hospitals, bulldozing hospitals,
you know, bombing schools with refugees in them, et cetera, et
cetera. Also in the West Bank, I went, I
don't remember, maybe 10 times to the village of Bill Lane,
which has lost at least 60% of their land to the wall.
The what what many people would call the apartheid wall, what
ISRO calls its wall for security and every Friday now I'm not
sure. I haven't been there since 2007
and unfortunately you know my my attention has been diverted to
many places. I still of course follow and and
and very concerned about Palestine, but I'm not sure if
they're still demonstrating every Friday, but at least back
then, every Friday they would demonstrate nonviolently and
very creatively on their land protesting the theft of their
land. And at least 10 times I went
with them and was usually at the front with the leaders of these
demonstrations and the leaders being people, there was not one
leader. I I should rephrase that there
were a few people who were perceived as leader, but it was
almost the entirety of the village that would go to these
demos and we would walk down the road and Israeli soldiers would
put razor wire across the road and then they'd start firing
high velocity tear gas canisters, rubber coated metal
bullets and even live ammunition at the crowd.
And I saw this on on many, many occasions.
And they again, later they would say, well, you know, there was a
security threat, so we had to do this.
But when I was there, I saw they always started firing before any
young Palestinian took a slingshot and lobbed Iraq.
You know, So that's the kind of things I could talk more and
more for actually many hours about what I was seeing.
Eva, just just let me ask you a question there.
Were you scared? Did you find it frightening?
What? What was happening around?
You. Absolutely.
There was 1 village I was in. OK, so in this in Baleen I'll
finish talking about that. One of the things we would as
activists would do would try to prevent Palestinians from being
abducted because as I mentioned the whole village, pretty much
the whole village was protesting.
But what the Israelis army will do is they'll do raids, day or
night raids into the village and they will abduct in prison those
who they perceived to be leaders because they think that if they
take the person A or B then the village will stop protesting.
But of course that didn't happen because the whole village knew
what it was protesting for. One of the things we would do,
it's if we saw the army was taking someone from the village
and it was for no reason whatsoever they had done nothing
wrong. We would latch onto them, We
would physically grab onto them. There was one time when about
four people I was holding on to one man and three other
activists I think were holding on to him and the whole pile of
people fell on top of me. This as soldiers surrounded us
and were kicking at us. I I don't remember, but I was
told they were kicking at my head.
Quite have heard. And then they threw, they lobbed
a tear gas canister right at us when they couldn't take the man.
And so, you know you're in a massive cloud of tear gas.
That was at the time frightening, but then it would
get worse. Months later, I was in a village
called Azun. This is one of the villages that
was coming under night raids, and Israeli soldiers fired some
sort of flash or flare directly at the window of the apartment I
and other activists were staying in.
So that was at the time, scary. But, you know, I was the first
time I was detained. I was in Hebron.
I was with a female activist. We had been standing at a
checkpoint. So I'm sure your listeners know,
but if not, there's, I don't even know the number of
checkpoints, hundreds and hundreds of checkpoints
throughout the West Bank, which is supposed to be Palestinian
territory. They can be full on turnstiles.
They could be two jeeps parked together.
They could be checkpoints and roadblocks.
And this one in Hebron was a turnstile checkpoint, and it was
near the main mosque, the Ibrahimi Mosque, and we're
standing there. And Israeli soldiers were doing
what is a common tactic. They'd taken the the Huiyas, the
IDs, So the Palestinians, they were holding them for hours.
And so if the Palestinians don't have their IDs, they can't go
anywhere because if they're stopped without an ID, they're
straight to Israeli prison. So they're standing there
detained because the Israeli soldiers, for no reason other
than pure harassment, are holding their IDs.
And so we confronted them and said, you know, we're watching
you. We see what you're doing.
Why are you doing this? You know, I can't remember all
the legal aspects behind like what you can say in that
instance. So we were detained and we were
taken to some police installation for a couple hours.
That was scary. But then the next time I was
arrested for two days, handcuffed and shackled for all
that time. That was scary.
And that was because we had been with Palestinians who were
protesting illegal roadblocks in their village, Sara leading,
which would cut off a road that would lead them to Nablus and it
would be like a 5 minute drive. But because that road was cut
off, this meant they had to take a very roundabout route with
many roadblocks and checkpoints in the way.
So meaning what should have been a 5 minute drive could take one
or two or more hours. And of course, obviously this is
an annoyance, but if you have like an emergency, a medical
emergency, then it could be life or death.
And that's the other aspect of these roadblocks is that people
do die at them for want of medical attention.
So we had been with Palestinians.
They had removed these big concrete roadblocks by chains
and pulling and then the Israeli military returned or they
arrived and they said, OK, this is now a closed military zone,
which is one of the things they can do to say anybody here is
going to be arrested. This is a village.
It's a village Rd. And so we protested and we were
taken and held in a a, a police station in one of the illegal
colonies near Nablus for two days.
And then finally we had, we had an Israeli, a lawyer who worked
with the ISM without, you know, fee.
She finally was intervened to help us and secure our release.
So that was, that was a little bit scary.
But I mean, you know, the real, the real scary things that I
endured were in Gaza. We can get to that.
But eventually I was deported. I was arrested another time and
deported and and told I was banned from returning to
Palestine. I spent several months, maybe
four months, in Egypt in 2008, a couple of those, almost two of
those at which of which I was near the Rafah crossing trying
to enter Gaza. I'd actually had an offer from
the Palestinian Center for Human Rights to go work there in the
English department. I had tried to go while still in
the West Bank through from the West Bank.
I hadn't been granted permission, so I didn't
physically go, but if I had, I'd wanted to go from the West Bank
through Israel into the Aras crossing and into Gaza.
But in my experience, the Aras crossing is notoriously
impossible for people to cross unless you're like the really
official international organization.
Fast forward to 2008, there was a Scottish delegation trying to
deliver medical supplies into Gaza.
They had said I could go with them if they could get in.
They they weren't able to get in.
At that time there was a a boat movement trying to highlight the
siege Israel's imposed on Gaza since, well, 2006 really, but
fully since 2007. So they were sailing from Cyprus
to Gaza, and to be honest, none of us really thought they'd make
it. But astoundingly, they did.
And I think the first two boats arrived in August, if I recall
2008, and I'd I'd met some of the organizers the previous year
in Hebron. And so I contacted them and
said, hey, I've been waiting, you know, in Egypt for a while
to try to get in. Could I join your movement?
They said yes. So in November I sailed from
Cyprus to Gaza and our boat also arrived.
Now I don't understand why it wasn't stopped.
We did have an Israeli gunboat flanking us about a kilometer to
the north and communicating with the the communicating with the
boat. And we had all collectively
decided that if they tried to intercept us, we would go forth,
even if it meant being arrested. There were a number of European
MPs on board that boat. Lord Ahmed Nazir, you might
know, was on that boat. And also Israeli journalist
Amira Haas, who writes for Haaretz.
She was on the boat That was very interesting.
And so that was the way I first got to Gaza because, you know,
the rest of the rest of occupied Palestine was off limits to me
now. And having got there in November
2008, I stayed for another for a year and a half, eventually left
through Rafa and went back for another year and a half over the
course of the next few years. That's that's quite an adventure
and you just you describe being held for two days, shackled and
held for Tuesday for two days as as rather scary.
I I know people who've been taken into police stations here
in UK and held for a few hours and the effect on them is, is
quite considerable because this is them being taken out of
their, their frame of comfort. They're under the control of
other people they don't trust. And I know people who found just
that experience of going into police custody here in UK as
being very scary indeed. So I can imagine that you were
actually under some some stress because you're in a foreign
country, you can't trust the people.
You don't know what's going to happen, where we're getting
getting to with this this this takes a lot of guts to do so.
Eva, I admire you for doing that and you're on this journey in
order to understand first hand what's actually happening in in
Gaza and the West Bank. All credit to you.
So what? What happens next then?
How do you get deeper into this? So, so I arrived in Gaza in
November 2008 and I rejoined the ISM.
And I think I, I differ politically with ISM on their
stance or at least some members of the ISM on their stance
regarding Syria, which is one reason why I'm, I don't think
I'd be welcomed back in that organization.
But I respect what they do in Palestine and I was proud to
work with them. And so in Gaza, it's, I mean you
can imagine that it's in it's in it's greatly intensified what
Palestinians endure in Gaza because Israel can bomb there at
any time as we're seeing now. But I think what maybe people
don't know if they're not falling so carefully is that the
things that Palestinian, for example, farmers and fishers
endure on a near daily basis. So that's that's 11.
Those are two areas where we devoted a lot of our time as
activists accompanying farmers, accompanying fishers.
And the reasons we did so was because when they venture, when
the fishers venture out into the water, whether on one of their
small trawlers with a an inadequate motor, because
they're not allowed to have them powerful motors.
Because the Israeli Navy will chase them, and they, the
Israeli Navy basically will attack them with if they're if
they're lucky, it's only high-powered water cannon, often
laced with some chemical compound smelling like
excrement. This is it is a powerful can
water cannon and does break structural elements.
It destroys navigational equipment, etcetera, Shatters
windows. But if they're lucky, it's only
that because otherwise the Israeli Navy will attack
Palestinian fishers with machine gunfire and with cannon fire.
So we would accompany the fishers to document that kind of
thing. Now I got there in November.
The 1st activist arrived in August and they spent months
accompanying the fishers. When I arrived in November, I
went out only the one time and then I don't remember the exact
date. I think was around November
18th, there were maybe three, sorry, six or seven of us there.
And so we had decided one day, OK, three people will go out
with the fishers and the rest of us will go to a demonstration
against the siege. And I think the demo is going to
be in northern Gaza. So we went there for the same
reason, to be there to document when Israeli firing on
protesters would commence, because that was another aspect
that I saw many times over with farmers and with unarmed
protesters is the Israeli army doesn't use tear gas, they just
start with sniper fire. So that day the three
internationals went out with the fishers and they were abducted
by the Israeli Navy along with, I think it was 15 Palestinian
fishers. The internationals were
eventually released. Most of the fishers were.
But this this is an aspect that gets almost no attention.
When the Israeli army attacks fishers, if they don't only fire
on them, they will abduct them. They will take their boats.
They will keep their boats or destroy them.
And they often keep the fishers imprisoned.
And then they'll ask them, because I we we interviewed a
number of fishers later, and many of whom have been
repeatedly attacked or abducted. And they would be asked, the
Israeli soldiers would be asking them for questions like
intelligence questions about Hamas or tunnels or stuff that
they had no idea. They're simple poor fishers.
These are like some of the poorest people in Gaza, and just
one other point before I move on to farmers.
But the even the Israeli Navy will even fire on and abduct or
injure fishers that are on what they call a hasaka, which looks
like a surfboard. The Fisher paddles out, like
however far a kilometer or whatever drops their net.
And later from shore they pull the Nets in.
And so you can imagine a skinny Palestinian Fisher standing on
what looks like a surfboard. You know, there's quite visibly
no threat whatsoever to this massive Israeli gunboat and yet
they fire on them. So this whole pretext of Israel
firing on fishers as because the fishers, you know, are are
terrorists or, you know, a threat to their security, it's
just absolutely ridiculous. And that example, I think
highlights it with the farmers, and not only farmers, but
anybody in regions in the north or east, anywhere up to 1 or
even more more than one kilometer from the fence
imprisoning Gaza. Anybody in that region are at
risk of being fired upon by Israeli soldiers, either from
who've gotten out of their jeeps and assumed sniper position on
earth and mounds that surround the fence, or from remotely
controlled gun towers where the soldiers firing are nowhere near
Gaza. So what we used to do is
accompany farmers. And now Israel at the time had,
I don't know exactly now, they first had imposed a, what they
called a buffer zone and no go zone on on the Gaza side of the
fence. It was initially 50 meters and
then they increased to 300 meters.
It would fluctuate, but basically at that time when I
was there, the maximum they said was 300 meters, but we were
always accompanying farmers 45600 meters or more and we'd
still came under Israeli gunfire.
So even this, this, this pretext like, OK, 300 meters is
illegitimately imposed by the Israeli side.
There's 300 meters you can't go to.
But if you're 45600 meters, why is Israel firing or Israeli
soldiers firing at unarmed Palestinian farmers, including
elderly men and women, including children?
Entire families, you know, would be on their land and they'd come
under Israeli fire. So that's something we did for
over the course of the three years I was there, I accompanied
farmers. And Eva?
Eva, can I ask you here, you you're experiencing this, you're
amongst it. Were were you actually reporting
on this as well at this stage? I was writing about it.
I I wasn't on on TV reporting because I, you know, I started
as an activist. When I was in the West Bank, I
was blogging. I didn't even use my real name
because who was I? I had a A blog.
I I OPT 2007. When I went to Gaza, I started
my current blog called In Gaza, but again, nobody knew who I
was, so I was blogging. I was sharing as much as I
could. I didn't actually start writing
for publications until, I don't know, maybe 2009 for rabble
Canadian publication. I wrote obviously reports for
the ISMI, started writing for Inter Press Services, So I did
report a lot for Inter Press Services.
This is 2009 or 10 on Israeli's policies in the buffer zone, the
border areas. So I was reporting on that, and
actually this might be of interest to you, but there was
on many occasions, Brian, when I was with Palestinian farmers, we
were under intense Israeli fire. And you know, they would say
these were warning shots. Warning shots, my understanding,
would be fired in the air. They were firing at our bodies.
OK, they could have killed us if they wanted to, but they're
trying to intimidate us and frighten us from accompanying
the farmers. They shot around me and hit a
Palestinian farmer in his leg. So they they can definitely
shoot. And they three weeks prior to
that they shot his cousin in the neck and killed him.
And this was from southern southeastern Gaza, extremely
poor, poor family. These two men were working as
paid laborers, earning a pittance for their extended
family. So this this farmer that lived
but he was, you know shot in the leg.
The What we learned is OK, you can't stand too far ahead of the
farmers because they'll just shoot around you.
But on many occasions we had bullets whizzing past our head
or puffs of dust rising near us from the impact of the bullet
nearby. On one occasion, the activists
from the media office had contacted our respective
embassies and somebody from the Canadian embassy in Tel Aviv
called my mobile. I had an old Nokia back then and
they said, hey, we understand you're under fire, blah, blah,
blah. And when they realized it wasn't
from Palestinians, their tone changed.
Because I guess initially they thought Palestinians were firing
on us. And because they'd asked a
number of questions like, you know, where are you?
I'm like, well, I'm we're on farmland.
You know, what's what's near you?
I said, well, half demolished houses from Israeli destruction.
And then when she, this woman I was speaking with from the
Canadian embassy realized that when I said it's Israeli
soldiers firing at us, she said, well, how do you know it's
Israeli soldiers? I said because I saw them get
out of their Jeep as they always do, and start firing.
This isn't, this is common. And she said, well, we can't
help you. And some minutes later somebody
who was her superior superior called me and he said we just
want you to understand, you know, Israel has security
measures. And I said, hey, his name was
Jordy, you understand I'm an unarmed Canadian citizen with
other internationals who are unarmed, with Palestinian
civilians who are unarmed, and we're all being fired upon by
the Israeli military. He said, oh, there's nothing we
can do, you know? So like literally that blase
about it, which says a lot. I think we have.
We have countless videos of this.
You know, I wasn't always filming.
Sometimes one of us would be holding the the bullhorn.
And for the sake of videos we would be saying on the bullhorn
we are internationals with unarmed Palestinian farmers who
are simply working on their land.
There's no one here with a weapon.
There's no need to fire at us, you know, just to make the
point, if it wasn't already clear enough that the Israeli
soldiers were firing on unarmed civilians.
So one of us would have the task of being in bullhorn, others
would photograph, others would video.
So sometimes I'm in the video, sometimes I'm doing the video.
But we have. We have so many instances of
video footage showing the Israeli army firing on us on on
Palestinian most important. So to ask the the question
you're you're starting to put out information and now you're
talking about videos. Did were you getting any
reaction from anybody? Do you think you were getting at
that time? Were you getting any engagement
from people who were, who were learning from your reports and
who then who then approached you?
What what about those MPs, for example?
Were you able to make any contacts with them?
I I honestly, I I didn't follow up with them.
I guess, you know, maybe strategically that wasn't a a
great idea. But my focus was on, because
there was so much happening, not only the farmers and fishers.
But bear in mind, November 2008 was a month and some weeks right
before Israel started its 2008, 2009 war on Gaza, what they
called cast LED. During which time we rode in the
ambulances of the Palestinian Red Crescent and I was I was in
northern Gaza. I was in Beitanoon, Beit Lahia,
Jabalia, which is in the news these days, you know, sometimes
in Gaza City they let the power was cut to the only places.
We had electricity and Internet was one of the standing media
buildings. My time was divided between
going with the medics. And the reason we went with the
medics was because we knew Israel historically would attack
Palestinian ambulances and kill or maim medics.
So we were going there effectively to act as deterrence
if possible. Like we made a press conference
and we said we're going to be riding in the ambulances.
If you kill the medics, you could potentially kill an
international, which I'm, I don't think my life is worth
more than a Palestinian. But I know that in terms of
media, we we knew that international being injured
would have more media interest than unfortunately I don't like
it. That's the reality that a
Palestinian being injured. And Eva did did you did you come
into contact with any any sort of proper major media
journalists? Were were was CNN around or BBC
did were there? Were there any established media
outlets who were also reporting that you came across?
Now, do you mean specifically during that three weeks of war?
Well, you can expand it a bit because this is one of the
things which I think our listeners will be interested in.
You are there as a as a a single woman, you're in a very
dangerous and scary environment and you are there to learn and
ultimately report. Where were the mainstream
journalists and and you know you can expand it over over time in
the years ahead. When, when did you manage to see
some of the mainstream people reporting?
In my time in Gaza, I didn't, so I was there from November 2008
to mid 2010 and then I left for a year.
I came back in mid 2011 and was there off and on until March
2013. No, that's now.
I have to correct myself. I did.
See.
Now I remember a Canadian, I think it was CTV.
After the war I'd have to dig through some blog posts, but
after the war I remember going to an eastern, eastern Gaza,
east of Gaza City area where the Wafa rehabilitation hospital
was. And at that time, I remember I
had a CTV crew is, I mean this is so far back, so sorry for
forgetting that following me. And I was pointing out where
Israel had fired white phosphorus on this
rehabilitation hospital which still had patients in it.
And I knew one of the patients, a young young boy, a teenager
who had been injured in a previous Israeli war and who
ultimately died many years later.
But I I don't remember much about the quality of their
interview. I was still very new to needy at
that time, Brian. I was, I was blogging.
I was, I had only started writing for various for free,
you know for various publications.
My main interest was getting information out.
So I don't remember, you know, the quality of of whatever CCTV
did. I will also say in the in the in
the December 2008, January 2009, three weeks of Israel's war in
Gaza. I was contacted by CBC because
at that time in in the weeks before that Israel had closed
the Arabs crossing, which was the only crossing mainstream
journalist would go through. And so I don't believe.
Now, I might be wrong, but I don't recall there being any
mainstream journalist there during that war.
There might have been one journalist, but I have no idea
what outlet he was with. But it at any rate, the CBC did
contact me. And I remember again being new
to median, being like they said, you know, we're thinking about
interviewing you next week. And I remember just being like,
well, why next week? Why not right now?
I'm ready to speak right now. You know what?
I don't always have electricity and Internet.
Why don't you want to speak to me?
And the reason was they want to line up a Canadian in Israel so
they could have a balanced report, which actually
ultimately backfired on them. Because whenever I didn't know
that, I didn't know until later. And my brother told me he'd
listened to it. And then I understood.
But basically I was reporting to them saying, you know, I'm
riding with medics. We're one ambulance I was in, We
came under Israeli sniper fire. A medic was shot in his leg.
The 14th bullet hit the back of our ambulance.
So we speed away. This is during cease-fire hours,
when, you know, nobody should have been shot and medics should
never be shot. I talked about a medic I had
worked with one night, and the next day he went out on call and
Israeli soldiers fired a dart bomb at his ambulance, and he
was killed. So I was talking about that.
I was talking about what we're seeing in Gaza now, although now
is just so much worse than what I saw.
And what I saw was horrible, but so I was, I had just endless
things to say. In the CBC interview I was
talking about how there was no safe place that there's no bomb
shelters hospitals were being targeted, the Kurds hospital.
Now I don't remember when the CBC interview was so this might
have happened after that interview but the point being I
was saying a lot of horrific things and apparently the
Canadian volunteering on Israeli base was just talking about you
know is having a great time. People are really nice they're
like different dynamic. I I was going to mention the
Kurds hospital. So during that three weeks of
war Israel did similar to what it's doing now, except now of
course it's worse. It had the land invasion had
occurred and the Israeli soldiers had invaded the Tel
Hawa region of Gaza City where the Kurds hospital is located
and they had shelled it numerous times.
And I believe if I recall correctly at least one shell had
white phosphorus and I have other experience with white
phosphorus. But so the medics were going
from Shifa hospital, which is the main hospital, to Kurds
hospital to evacuate patients. And we were under risk of
Israeli sniper fire because the soldiers were firing on anybody
coming near. But nonetheless, these
courageous medics were going to do what they could to evacuate
patients and take them to Shifa, which is already overflowing
with a similar situation, just no space for people.
But it was all they could do. They could just take people and
put them on the floor. So anyway, back to your
question, CBC. That was the only mainstream
media that talked to me. RT actually interviewed me
during that war. I had no affiliation with RT.
I'd never written for them. Somehow they became aware of me.
I did an interview with them and shortly after that interview,
the Israeli, I think it was tank fire or helicopter fire shelled
the building I was in seven times.
So we ran down 10 or 12 flights of stairs.
Thankfully nobody was injured, but that was, you know, these
are some of my first experiences of like just crazy.
When I was saying to the CBCI don't think I had, I I don't
think I was together. I think I sounded pretty crazed
because it was. I'd never experienced anything
like that before. Eva, I'm fascinated by by what
you're telling me. You have so much detail and of
course these are all your personal memories.
And already I'm I'm thinking, yes, all of the time, all those
years ago when I was, what would I be doing?
I'd be listening to the BBC or reading newspapers and and and
obviously the information we were getting in the West.
You used the term balanced. You said they wanted to do a
balance report, and I smiled slightly because it seems to me
that balance has a wonderful way of of suppressing what's the
important truth and overlaying it with what is the comfortable
truth. But maybe my opinion's not fair
on that. But that's what came into my
head. But yeah, I'm.
I'm thinking, yes. So I was one of the people who
was getting this, this sanitized news coming in as to what was
what was really happening on the ground.
Can we just move you on through your life a bit?
When did you get, when did you go from reporting on Palestine
to starting to get involved with Syria?
Just just take us into that a bit.
But, and I also want to move you on to Donbas.
OK. Yeah, I'll try to.
I'll try to summarise more quickly, so.
No, don't apologise. Because, because the aim of the
the aim of the game isn't it for the audience is, is to get out
as much information as we can about your experiences and what
what you what you saw and why you felt it was so important to
put yourself at risk to report. Thank you.
But tell us about Syria and and how then you got on to Donbass
as. Well, OK, Well, I did just make
a mention of RT. So I just want to say I think my
first article op-ed for RT was in 2013 and was actually on
Israel's harassment and abuse of Palestinian fissures.
So that was the first time I ever contributed to a major
platform because prior to that it had been like I said,
dissident Voice, Rabble and some other, you know, independent
media. And so I I left Gaza in March
2013. I actually, I didn't mention
this, but it is kind of, I've said it publicly, so I'm not,
you know, nothing to hide. But when I went back in in in
2011, I couldn't get in through Rafa.
This is important actually, because one of the reasons it's
so difficult for journals who want to report honestly to do so
from Gaza is, like I said, to go in through errors is virtually
impossible. Errors is the northern crossing
controlled by Israel, and Rafa is the crossing ostensibly
controlled by Egypt, but over which Israel has considerable
influence. And so when I went back in to, I
tried to go back to Gaza in mid 2011.
I couldn't get in through Rafa, so I ended up going in through a
tunnel and spending think two months there and leaving by
tunnel and then later going back and finally being able to get in
through Rafa. So just to to make the point, I
think one reason, well not I think for sure one reason I
haven't been back is that now last time I checked, getting to
Rafa period is impossible. I know there's a delegation of
Westerners trying to go from Cairo to Rafa with aid, and they
as far as they didn't make it. And I I unfortunately already
knew they wouldn't make it because it's just impossible to
get there. So Gaza for now is off limits to
people who want to go and support, and I would be there in
a heartbeat if I could, but there's just literally no way
for me to get there but in. So after I left in 2013, I went
back to Canada. Now when things started in
Syria, I remember talking with other activists and and people I
knew and whose opinions I trusted and saying like, I knew
nothing about Syria. And this is kind of goes back,
Brian, to what I was saying at the beginning.
You know, I was so naive about so many places, which was in a
sense of blessing because I didn't have the propaganda bits
in my head. I didn't automatically think,
aha, this is what aligns with the propaganda I was told.
I just didn't know it. So I didn't have any any ideas
about the president of Syria or anything like that.
And I saw the reports, you know, in in Gaza, the main channel is
primarily Al Jazeera. And and fortunately, while they
do good reporting on Palestine, on Syria, they were utterly
complicit to have blood on their hands for putting forth the NATO
propaganda on Syria and for so much misinformation and war
propaganda that protracted the war on Syria.
But you know, at the time, I wasn't aware of that.
All I knew was I was asking questions.
And early on, because I remember going back to my Facebook post
and as early on as 2011, I was with, you know, sharing things
like no war on Syria, no, no intervention in Syria.
In 2012 I created an e-mail list, I think it was called No
Syria Intervention. It's been a while.
And then sometime the following year a number of other older
activists myself formed the Syria Solidarity Movement, not
to be confused with the UK one which was pro war, but ours.
The main premises were we wanted to share accurate information,
we were anti intervention, we were pro, you know, serious
right to resolve the crisis itself, etcetera.
But then I I wanted to to go to Syria for the same reasons I
wanted to go to Palestine, to see for myself, to hear for
myself. At that point I understood quite
a bit of Arabic, having lived in Gaza for a while.
And so in 2014 I went for my first time to Syria as part of a
large peace delegation. And then, since I was already
now you, as you I'm sure are aware, Canada, like many other
Western nations, closed Syrian embassies in like 2011 or 2012.
So if I wanted to apply for a journalist visa here in Canada,
I'm not in Canada. In Canada I couldn't because
there's no way to do so. And I'd actually inquired.
So I I joined this peace delegation.
And then after that I stayed in Lebanon, I went to the Syrian
embassy there and I applied for a journalist visa.
And other journalist told me, you're not going to get it,
you're not going to get it. I said, well, you know what?
I'm here. I might as well try because I
can't do it in Canada. And I did get it actually.
And again, I didn't have any sort of affiliations.
Nobody was paying for me. I was doing it myself.
I got a journalist fees and I went back to Syria, and this is
back to Syria in June 2014. So my first visit was April 2014
and I went to some pretty important places like Malula,
which had been liberated one month prior, I believe it was.
So the the destruction in that ancient Christian Aramaic
speaking village was still very fresh.
So I was able to document that and speak with people there.
And I went to Homs. I went to old Homs which had
also just been liberated 2 months prior, and spoke with
the, you know, people in the old city of Homs which had been
devastated and which at one point had been called the
capital of the revolution. And I use revolution in
quotation marks. Obviously I don't endorse that
narrative. I spoke with people there who
they said the same things I would later hear in Aleppo, in
in Ghouta, in various areas of Syria that had been occupied by
the various terrorist groups backed and and supported by the
West. And these civilians I spoke of
said, you know, they terrorized us, they stole from us.
In Homs, I remember meeting an older brother and sister who
lived together who they said we nearly starved to death because
they came and they stole everything from us.
I went to the church where a father, he was a Dutch I believe
Father Franz Vanderloot, he had been an honest observer of
events and he he, he wrote on his blog, I think or in an
interview. He said like from the beginning
I saw armed men amongst the the revolutionaries.
So he was very critical of what the West was portraying as an
unarmed revolution. And he was assassinated in, I
think it was in 2014, 2014, June 2014 when I was there, was
actually also just after the the presidential elections then.
And the interesting thing, Brian, is that during the actual
elections, I was in Lebanon waiting for a visa to be issued
or not be issued. I didn't know if I would get it.
And since I was in Lebanon and the elections were taking place
there, I was like, OK, well, I guess I'll just go to the
embassy and see what's happening.
So I got on a local bus in Beirut.
Yeah, I knew how to do this by that point.
The first time I'd taken a taxi was quite expensive.
And then I learned how to take local transport.
So I got on a local bus, went as far as I could, got talking with
Syrians along the way. They were all super happy to be
going to the embassy. They had their flags.
They're chanting, they're singing.
There's so much traffic on that road that the road was clogged
and we had to walk for three or 4 kilometers to reach the
embassy. And then it was like a festival,
like the atmosphere. So the reason I make this point
is that the Western narrative, just like they did with Donbass
in September 2022, during that referendum, they would say, oh,
this is illegal or they were forced to vote, OK, you can, you
can make these claims about Syria.
Although if you go to Syria and you spend any time there, you
will very quickly learn that people who went to vote did so
because they wanted to. And it was the same in Lebanon
because if they, if the propagandists make this claim
about Syria or they were forced to vote.
So why did millions of Syrians go to vote in Lebanon?
Why did the embassy have to stay open for a second unplanned date
till midnight, not 7:00 PM? You know, but it's not logical
if, if, if, and these are many of them are Syrian refugees and
many of them might have been undocumented, you know, Syrians
in in Lebanon who forced them to vote, then how did Bashar
al-Assad manage to force them over there to vote?
You know, it didn't make any sense.
So it was interesting to be there at that time.
I went back another 13 times to Syria in 2016.
I spent two months in the summer and two months in the winter in
Syria going to very interesting places, like going to Aleppo in
July and in August. In July I went to Aleppo for my
first time. Now what Western media wasn't
reporting, what my dear friend and colleague and your friend
and colleague Vanessa Bailey also reported.
We went together in August was that that city was being
bombarded by terrorists on a daily basis And no, you know,
Western media weren't reporting that.
They were only reporting the the sources, the unnamed sources
they had in eastern Aleppo, which was occupied by various
terrorist gangs. But, you know, by the end of the
2016, the chief of forensics had told me nearly, I think it was
nearly 10,000 or nearly 11,000 civilians alone had been killed
by terrorist bombings and snipings.
And that was completely unreported by Western media.
So in in 2016, I spent, like I said, four months in Syria.
And then every year I went back 3 * 2 times for a cumulative 15
times. So that was, you know, and and
along with Vanessa, who now lives there, we were going to
places that media was completely fabricating.
And in Syria, I did see Western journalists.
We saw, at least you say, of the BBCI saw her in 2014.
She was at the French Hospital in Damascus interviewing
children who had been at a school, the Menar Elementary
School, that had been shelled by terrorist mortars.
This is April 2014, and she was challenged by somebody.
Are you going to report honestly?
And she nodded her head and I filmed it.
So I was like, I know who this is.
I don't believe she's going to be honest.
And she wasn't really honest. She later wrote a report,
something titled Russian Roulet or something and she said, you
know, something to the effect of the regime blames the rebels.
But locals believe it's the regime.
And I don't use the word regime. I'm.
I'm quoting her or paraphrasing her.
And if you've spent any time on the ground in Damascus or other
areas being shelled, you know damn well where it's coming
from. We knew it was coming from
Eastern Ghouta. They knew they were shelled
every day. They knew where it was coming
from. This is utterly dishonest and
intentional on Lise Desai's part for the BBC.
Whether it's her or her editor at the BBC, it was completely
dishonest. If I can just come in there,
because what's immediately in my mind here is, is the BBS, sorry,
the BB, CS charity, BBC Media Action, which we the UK column
started to pay attention to. And what did we discover?
We discovered that this, it calls itself a charity, but
that's ridiculous because The thing is completely politically
active. But BBC Media Action was
boasting via a lady. If I remember correctly, she was
called Julia Harkin, she was one of their effectively project
managers in Syria and she's on. Public record was saying, well,
we worked with people, we we sought out and we worked with
people who were against the regime in order to assist
change. So what?
What this was was a declaration that the BBC wasn't just
reporting remotely and impartially on what was
happening under the surface, They were actually involved in
trying to help the overthrow of the Syrian government.
Yeah, I mean that that's absolutely what they and Allied
Media were doing. Channel 4, for example, Krishna
and Guru Murthy appeared various times in Syria.
I actually was in an elevator with him.
I just didn't know who he was at the time, but he would, he would
do the same thing. You know, he would totally
whitewash the the terrorist factions and actually Syrian MP,
well he used to be MP and and businessman Farah Shahabi called
him out after after Aleppo was liberated.
Because, you know, these type of propagandists were saying things
like, oh, you know, now that the, that Aleppo has fallen, as
they described the liberation of Aleppo from Al Qaeda and ISIS
and other terrorists, the Western media would say Aleppo
had fallen. And they'd say, you know, all
the civilians have left the city, which was the opposite of
truth actually, people were coming back to Aleppo.
And there's a funny clip of Farah Shahabi saying this to
Krishnan Guru Murthy, who's trying to get some sound bite
from Farah Shahabi. And you could tell by the body
language from Guru Murthy that he knew he was lying and he he
hated being caught out in his lies and he just wouldn't answer
the question of Farah Shahabi. He just said let's not get into
history. It wasn't history.
It was literally a couple of months prior.
And the and the the this, this is all the nuances that most
people, most people in the UKUSUSA, the West, simply don't
appreciate. The extent to which their, you
know, their belief that they have free media in the BBC or
wherever, whatever it's going to be, Fox or CNN, it doesn't
really exist because there's immense spin put on things if
it's not outright propaganda. I mean this, this has been the
big shock for me in my life, to discover that the country that
that I serve for 21 years in the military was was not, was not
what I thought it was. And as I've dug deeper, one of
the things that that becomes more and more apparent is the
extent to which our media is propaganda.
You know, there are, there are so many examples from Syria
alone. Like again if we look at Aleppo
in 2016, throughout 2016 there were so many lies told in course
by Western media, you know, last pediatrician in Aleppo, last
doctor in Aleppo. That was actually my first trip
to Aleppo in July 2016. That was my mission, My personal
mission was to go and talk to doctors there.
So I went to the Aleppo Medical Society and found there was over
4000 doctors and an 800 specialists working actively
working in the city. You know, so it's just like the
media were telling this talking point because they wanted to
generate a a dramatic headline. They were referring anything any
of their coverage on Aleppo was referring exclusively to areas
occupied by these terrorist factions.
And you know, they they relied on these anonymous sources,
always anonymous sources. Or if they had, if they had a a
spokesperson, a media activist, they would often call them.
It didn't take much, Brian, to look at their Facebook presence
and and very quickly discern where their allegiances were.
ISIS, Al Qaeda, they had photos bragging about it, you know with
the different Insignia of these terrorist groups or with there
was one particular case and I know you've probably spoken
about this with Vanessa, but there there were two boys.
There was a boy named Amran Daknish and in 2016 his name and
his face was shown around the world and he was the he was the
the cute little boy sitting in an ambulance.
He was known as ambulance boy. And that the and the White
Helmets played a critical role in in lining up the story and
framing it literally. And the story was that the
Russians had bombed his house and you know, he, he'd been
saved by the White Helmets. And, you know, he was the face
of Syrian suffering because he sat in an ambulance with the
trickle of blood on his forehead and he looked confused and and
sad. And, you know, CNN Christian
Amanpour did a thing with Sergey Lavrov, handing the photo of
Amran to him and asking if if Lavrov thought Amran was a
terrorist or something like that.
Another CNN reporter, when she was reading her script, was just
crying as she stammered on her script for Amran.
But literally some. I forget the timeline, but there
was another boy, a Palestinian boy who had been beheaded by a
terrorist some months prior. Abdullah Issa, his name, and he
got no media attention whatsoever.
And one of the worst kind of ironies, I guess, is that one of
the photographers who got all his attention for taking this
photo of Amran sitting in the ambulance was literally friends
with the same terrorist who held Abdullah Issa in a pickup truck
and savagely cut his head off. He has grinning selfies with
with these terrorists. And then he would later go on to
say he cried for children like Omran.
Now Omran actually wasn't injured in a Russian air strike.
He wasn't even gravely injured. I was.
I by fortune I was in Aleppo in 2017 when his family spoke out,
when his father spoke out. And so the second day, the next
day I went, I requested to go to the house and I spoke with the
father and I met Omran, healthy little boy.
And the father said he had refrained from speaking to media
precisely because he knew they were lying.
He said the the the terrorist affiliated media, the local
media, you know under that would be called by by western you know
source factor or Ned backed different organizations like
Aleppo Media Center. They would this type of media
which would be pushing the NATO narrative.
They had tried to intimidate Amran Daktish's father into
telling the story they wanted him to tell.
And the story he told me and and other media, it was that there
wasn't an air strike and that his son was snatched from him.
His son didn't have a serious injury.
There was some sort of blast and that his area was known to be
supportive of the Syrian government and Syrian Army and
they were routinely under fire from terrorist groups.
So you know that that was a story that you still find media
using this image of Amanda Beach because it's a powerful image,
but the story's distorted, you know.
And none of these major networks that sobbed for Amran Dakmeech
ever corrected themselves. And even the Independent on
Twitter X until some years ago, they still have had Amran's
photo as the cover photo. So it's just like now I can, if
I can just, I'll I'll say it quickly, but I saw in terms of B
to B somewhere having information, not reporting.
I saw this also in Dunbas. So I first went there in
September 2019, again of my own accord.
I had visited Russia for my first time.
I was interested to come here, and I also was very interested
in going to Crimea and going to Donbass, which I did.
All my everything I arranged myself, I paid for myself.
I went at my own risk, without any sort of body armor.
In fact, the only time I first had body armor was was in the
Donbass, and it was lent to me by a media office there.
At the media office there, who saw that I had nothing.
I've never had body armor before that, not in Syria, not in Gaza,
whatever had become normal to me not to have body armor.
And after Gaza, frankly it seemed like pointless anyway.
In in Dundas. I went there in 27 in 2019 and
spent a few weeks there. Went to hard hit areas near
Gorelufka that were being shelled on a daily basis.
Spoke with the the head of the village, this one village site,
Saber, who said the Ukrainian forces are destroying houses
house by house, street by St. in this particular village.
And you know, I just took some testimonies from people who are
being affected by the Ukrainian shelling and then I wasn't able
to go back there until March last year again for my second
time. That time I went with a Russian
Ministry of Defence delegation. It went for two days, One day in
the Donas People's Republic at the time, One day in the Lugansk
People's Republic. And there were there were Arabic
media, there was myself, there were a couple other Westerners
reporting on who had been to the done best before, or who wanted
to, and there are two mainstream French channels.
I don't remember their names now.
One I think was Teve One. Anyway, Vanessa could fill me in
on that and I I wrote about it so I could find it in my
article. But they were mainstream French
channels and so we we went to sites that were pivotal to
understanding that that at the time since 2022 we went.
So at the time it had been eight years of Ukraine's war on the
Donbass. So we went to sites and talked
with people that highlighted this and highlighted also places
like in Mariupol or Volna Baja. The destruction there had
occurred due to Ukrainian shelling, not exclusively, but
for example, the hospital in Volna Baha, which is in between
Donetsk and Mariupol, had been occupied by Ukrainian forces and
they'd mind the ICU before leaving.
And actually I would later go back to Volna Baha and and talk
with other staff there. And they said before any Russian
forces entered that town, Ukrainian forces were shelling
the hospital. That's an aside, but this
French, these two French channels, I followed up on the
reporting and they didn't report on any of what we saw.
They didn't report on, for example, we went to the site of
Ukrainian bombing 2 weeks prior, which killed with with a touch
missile with classroom munitions in it.
They had killed 21 civilians 2 weeks prior in the center of
Donetsk. We saw the impact point, we saw
the memorial and the photo of the civilians killed.
We talked to the head of the DPR, Pushelin, you know, and we
saw that. And we we talked with the head
of the LPR. And also now her name escapes
me. I'm sorry, but people who could
detail Ukraine's crimes against civilians there.
And these two French channels didn't include a word of it
because I looked at all the reports I could find from them
at that time. And after, the only thing they
basically did was put out very short clips saying this is what
Russia wants us to see, which was Russia's humanitarian
efforts, you know, giving out food and water to these villages
like that had just been liberated.
That's it. This is what Putin wants us to
see. They included like a few seconds
of the doctor from this town, the city of Ulna Baha speaking.
He had very clearly, he was the one that very clearly said
Ukrainian troops had occupied the hospital and mined the ICU.
But they included only a few seconds of him stammering and
sounding stupid. You know, that was cherry
picking, intentional cherry picking.
So that's that's one example. You know, they've been given
access, they've been given a tour around that everything's
been made so easy for them to talk to people.
And yet they only include this these two bets to to basically
whitewash Ukraine's crimes. Even am I right in saying that
one of one of the places that you went to, you you got there
soon after one of the attacks and there there was still bodies
on the street? Many times, yeah.
So in April of last year, I was back in Donbass, so that I
mentioned the the Ministry of Defence delegation.
That was for two days in March. And then I kept going back over
the course of last year into this year, and I would spend a
few weeks there. I would rent an apartment.
There was one time where I did stay in a hotel, but most of the
time I would rent a nondescript apartment and I would travel by
foot or hire a taxi. And so in April, another
activist journalist and I took a taxi to a western Donetsk
district where during midday it was Ukrainian forces had shelled
a busy market. And so we went there not knowing
what we would see. And in fact, there's still two
bodies lying in the market. Five people had been killed that
day. We spoke with somebody.
I now I forget his official position, but he was affiliated
with the market, like overseer of the market or something.
And he was like, yeah, they're always shelling this area.
It's a working class area. This market was a large
sprawling outdoor market and it would have been, especially in
the mid midday. It would have been filled with
people because it's a cheap place for people to get
everything they need. But because of the danger of
Ukraine striking as Israel does, you know, double strike, triple,
triple strike. They I guess the emergency
services had taken injured away, but they hadn't cleared all the
bodies away. So there's still two bodies
lying there a couple hours later when this man and I went.
But then throughout the course of last year, when I was
reporting from there, particularly in September, in
the space of five days, three different Ukrainian attacks on
the center of Donetsk killed 26 people.
And in each case, the bodies I went immediately after.
And on one day sixteen were killed.
And in one area 13 were killed. And honestly, I saw and and
smelt the bodies and the parts of the bodies, and I could not
tell how many were there because they were so mutilated and they
were just in one area. They were a pile of bodies, and
you couldn't tell they were disfigured.
You couldn't tell what part belonged to whom.
It was horrific, you know? And I did film it.
Not out of disrespect for the dead, but because precisely I
feel that people need to see this.
Yeah, this this is a very important point, isn't it?
And it's it's a fine balance because if people are going to
really understand what's happening, they need to, they
need the accurate on scene reports and they need the photos
or the footage. Yeah.
So three days later, I'm sorry, but three days later, these were
all central Donetsk. 3 days later the Ukrainian forces fired
right next to the Central Market in central Donetsk, where
there's also a tram line or trolley bus line.
And I was renting an apartment like a 5 minute walk away.
So I this time I had body armour and I and another journalist
walked there. He was also renting an apartment
nearby. We walked there and this is
within half an hour of the strike.
And so there were six. I saw five.
There was two bodies in the the minibus that got hit, I saw one.
I didn't see the driver's body. The bus was burnt out and there
were two bodies inside and there are four other bodies on the
ground. And I don't normally appear in
my videos. I don't feel I need to be in
them. I don't feel I'm the subject.
But that particular day I turn my phone around and I film
myself for like 30 seconds saying this is real, this is not
staged because you have, you have the trolls, you have the
shills that will say, oh, this isn't real footage, oh, their
hands moving. And I'm like, these are real
body parts. This woman running behind me,
traumatized and screaming is really traumatized because she's
just, I experienced something very traumatic.
This is happening all the time. That's just not staged.
And then I turn the camera back, you know, on the corpses I was
seeing, the the pieces of their bodies I was seeing.
I don't think people understand. And this is I I want to also
make one other point that for a period I shut down comments in
my Telegram channel because I got so sick of people calling
for death and people who, you know, call for, oh, Russia
should just flatten Kiev. I don't agree with that.
I I agree with what Russia is doing its military objectives in
demilitarizing Ukraine and putting an end to Ukraine's
bombing of Donbass and also a peace for Ukrainian civilians
under the the Kiev regime. But I don't agree with these
calls. You should just bomb Kiev.
You should bomb Tel Aviv. I don't agree with that.
I don't agree with slaughtering civilians.
And I think that people who say this, they're living as if
they're in a video game world. They've never smelt death.
Important point, and I'm so pleased that you've brought it
up because yes, there are these people and they they seem to get
a particular thrill out of calling for more violence, the
violence that you and others are trying to report in order to get
it stopped. But it takes many forms.
I look at some of the channels and people are putting good
information out on social media channels.
One particular one, regular updates which come in every
hour, multiple reports, and usually they're very accurate.
But something I find very distasteful is that quite often
if there is a picture of combat where anti tank weapon is
exploding or a bomb is going off, that little video clip has
been put to usually heavy metal rock music.
And I find this very, very distasteful because it isn't a
video game. Whenever these weapons hit,
somebody is dying and others are being injured.
And to put it to music of that form is I think just well, I
find it difficult to describe. So I completely understand what
you're talking about. You're putting your life at risk
in order to get the real truth out.
And other people sitting in their warm, comfortable rooms
make it into a sort of, yeah, a a sort of quasi video game.
It's bad. I think it's also disrespectful.
To the people if. If if I take for.
Example, the forces on the ground in Donbass, you know
they're, they're, they're living in horrific conditions, very
difficult conditions. And you know, they're I I've, I
haven't been on the front lines that much.
I've only been, I would say, one time last year I went to
interview one of the particular groups, not that I I can't
remember their Russian name, and another time in Gorluka, close
to the front line. So what my focus has always been
is has more been trying to convey the human side, the
suffering and also to combat war propaganda.
But this one time that I did go to meet Donbass forces on a
frontline outside of Donetsk, I wanted to.
I wanted to hear their perspective.
And one of the things I asked them because the way the Western
media depicts everything to do with Russia, I asked them, do
you hate Ukrainians? And they're like, no, they're
our brothers. They're our brothers and
sisters. We, we don't want to kill
Ukrainians. We want this to stop.
But we're going to defend our land, you know, and that's just
a that I make that point because it kind of aligns with what
we're talking about. They're not saying, yeah, we
want to kill every last Ukrainian.
They're saying no, we wish they would lay down their weapons.
We could return to peace, you know.
And then you have these bombastic comments from people
who've never been anywhere near war or violent death like this.
You know, it's just, I don't know, it's just it it really is
a disgusting part of our our. I don't know if it's exclusively
Western culture, but it's a disgusting, disgusting part of
the this sort of culture. That celebrates death.
Yes, and Eva you you were. Put on the Ukrainian hit list as
a result of your reporting from Donbass.
Is that correct? Yeah, in 2019 after I went to.
Donbass and also to Crimea, I was put on there.
Now an interesting thing about that, I guess a couple of
points, June last year, I think this is completely, I don't for
a moment believe that I was a target, the target.
But in June, the hotel that I was staying in, I mentioned
earlier, I usually rent an apartment when I go to Donetsk.
But I was at one point staying in one of the main hotels
because I wanted to be near a journalist, because if something
was happening, I don't have a car and I figured I could get a
ride with them, go with them, you know.
And also my Russian has improved quite a bit since then, but I
honestly didn't understand much Russian back then.
So that was another element I wanted to be near journalist who
could potentially translate, whether from Russian to English
or Arabic to English, because there are journalists that speak
Arabic there as well. And I I do.
Anyway, in the course of staying in that hotel, was it June or
August? I'm sorry, it was August.
I think it was August 4th. The Ukrainian forces bombed
about 200 meters away, and then they bombed directly next to the
H2 times, once like 50 meters away and once directly next to
the hotel. And the only point I make in
terms of like journalists being targeted is number one, it was
known to Ukrainian forces that that journalists stay there.
Also. The weapons they were using were
precision weapons, NATO weapons and like the the last shell was
the last of five. So they got incrementally
closer. But the other point was that
some days or a week or so prior to that.
Now what's her name? Totally blanking.
I had, I had gone to the site, the Yelanovka prison South of
Donetsk, which had been bombed as according to Russian
authorities and by all credible reports.
I do think this is the truth. It had been bombed by Ukrainian
forces and there had been Azov state not staying there.
Azov Azov that had been in Azov stall were being imprisoned
there and some of them had been, had started talking about, you
know, the crimes they had committed.
And soon after that Ukraine bombed this Yelinovka prison.
Louise Mensch, that's her name. And anyway, so I had tweeted
about it and then somebody, somebody asked me if I was there
and I I stupidly replied, yes, I mean I didn't need to because
I'd already tweeted about it. And then Louise Mensch tweeted
at Special Forces Ukraine, hear that The implication being, you
know, deal with her, kill me. And then it was again sometime
after that. Well, it would have only been
some days after that because that was the end of July.
And then the hotel bombing right next to the hotel occurred on
August 4th. So that that could have been
coincidental. I'm not going to say I was being
targeted. I don't believe that.
I think it's highly possible. Ukraine was definitely targeting
the hotel, knowing there was journalists in it because
they've also bombed other hotels in Donetsk and other areas
knowing full well journalists for staying there.
So there's that. But what other I think is really
interesting, Brian, is that last year, so before that incident in
June, I think it was, CBC contacted me about a week after
two independent journalists in Canada had interviewed me and
they were highlighting the Killis The Mired for its entry
on me. Then a week later, CBC Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation contacts me saying, you know, we
want to do an interview with you.
And by this point, I know when mainstream media send you an
e-mail it it's best not to respond or else I just mock
them. But I don't engage with them
because I know they won't be honest or fair.
And they didn't. They had they ended up
contriving this absolutely ridiculous smear on me,
including scary music, just to show how evil I am.
But what was really interesting is they chose to highlight my
participation in a panel in Moscow back in March on Ukraine
war crimes. And so they are basically trying
to depict me some fool under the, you know, the stupefied
gaze of a Russian researcher, Maxim Grigoriev, basically
trying to stay. You know, I didn't know what I
was talking about. I was just taking talking points
from him, even though I had started going to Donbass in
2019. But that's apparently not
information that was important to them.
But they said this is the interesting bit, They had been
contacted by the two Canadian journalists who interviewed me.
And these two Canadian journalists were really worried
about me. And they said we're going to
contact all major Canadian media and ask them to take up your
case instead of taking up my case.
CBC did a smear on me and they used information from the Kill
List entry on me to do the smear.
And the reason I know this is because they stated my
participation in the panel was April last year and so does the
kill List entry. But actually they included a
screenshot of my participation in that panel.
And I could easily find the Russian website where, you know,
the video was posted And it was March and I remember it being
March. So the only place that they
would have shown, seen that it was April was the kill list
entry on me. So I mean not only did they not
advocate for me CBC, but they smeared me using information
from a kill list entry on me. And as I've said before, I feel
at this point, you know it, it could be very risky to go back
to Canada because the national media has has basically flagged
my name to Ukrainian nationalist, of which there are
many in Canada. And I don't believe I would be
safe in Canada. I don't believe I would be
protected by my government, which openly supports Nazis in
Ukraine. Yeah, Eva, this is, this is.
We're really. We're really.
Getting into things. Now and I've got, I've got to
say to you very gently I think we we're going to have to we're
going to have to bring this particular interview to close in
a minute. But but I if if if you're
agreeable, I would love to do more with you.
But yes, we're now into some some really.
It's amazing stuff, isn't it? Because we're now.
Starting to see what the media of the Western world really is
and the idea that it's it's independent and fair and
unbiased is is just ridiculous. It's it's that's not a
sustainable position anymore And maybe there's a difference,
slight difference between some of the media outlets, whether
CBC is better than the BBC, who knows.
But what we do know is that they are all working to very tightly
controlled government agendas. There's no question of this.
And yes, in here in UK we are seeing the BBC.
We can take a young lady called Mariana Spring as a prime
example, targeting people who were daring to speak out.
So I'll mention The Light newspaper as a team of people
that have been publishing expose articles and highlighting facts
and producing government reports and and drawing people's
attention to it. And what is their reward?
A vicious smear campaign by Mariana Spring from the BBC.
So this would be a topic that we could really focus in on.
And and I'm sure that I'm sure we would be able to come out
with a lot of information, which I think people in the West
should know, but just very gently, because I think on this
one we probably need to come to a close a little bit.
Let's come back onto the theme, Gutsy women.
The more you've told me, Eva, the more obvious it is to me
that you are indeed a very gutsy woman.
You've you've, you know, been in serious positions in West Bank
and Gaza, and that hasn't deterred you.
You've gone, you've gone on into other dangerous areas in inside
Syria, and then you've moved on to Donbass and paid a price for
that. Because not only have you been
close to the frontline and the live shelling, but then
ultimately you've been attacked, as you've just said by the by
the press. You're a gutsy woman, There's no
question about it. So I I have, I've got two
questions here. The first one is, what would you
say to other women who perhaps are now starting to see that the
world around them isn't quite as they thought?
Maybe they've already come into some form of of conflict with
authorities in whatever country they are.
For me, this is often in relation to the fact that women
and families, parents, have had children taken away from them.
But as a gutsy woman, what would you say to other women to get
them to stand up and be counted? It's, it's.
A hard question. Because what has primarily
motivated me is at first, you know, when I mentioned going to
Palestine because I wanted to see for myself.
And once you're there, whether Palestine, Syria, Donbass and
many other places, I have found that you experience, you get a
sense of the suffering they've endured, but also their immense
humanity. And it's it's I I think it's
very difficult when you've seen the kind of things that they're
enduring and yet they're they're still very loving, generous,
kind people. It makes it impossible for for
me, for Vanessa, for people like us to just resume a normal life.
So I guess what I want to say is my personal motivations have
been out of a desire to give voice to these people and to
counter the propaganda, which I've become more and more
acutely aware of. And that's been my my driving
force, a sense of injustice and doing what I can to combat that.
But I mean if you're, if you're talking about women who are in
positions where they are themselves being oppressed, I
think that's for me, it's difficult to give advice to
because I mean if you're depending on how you're being
oppressed or attacked, it could be dangerous to you.
I guess what I would say is in terms of when it comes to
worrying about what people say about you, if it's if it's
merely worrying about your, your, your reputation.
I when I was first smeared by media, I was kind of like what?
And it happened all at once. The whole a bunch of media
jumped all over me and said all these things about me.
So at first it was jarring, but it really doesn't matter because
I I believe, look, I'm not taking talking points from a
government or an intelligence agency agency.
I'm reporting what I see and what I hear, and I I believe in
what I do. Nobody's perfect.
I don't claim to have all the answers, but my point is I I
believe that if you're really doing something in all sincerity
that you believe in that if people are going to attack you
verbally or you know in in writing, yeah, can be
demoralizing. But my I guess my advice would
be stand with what you know to be true and you know it it it
takes time. Maybe it won't take time for
you, but the the whole intent with this name calling in
whatever capacity or the smears is to demoralize you is to make
you not want to speak out or stand up.
So if you're in the position where you can safely do so
safely, meaning like I'm not talking about reporting from a
war zone necessarily, but like without, you know, if you're not
at risk of of, let's see, like violence in the home or
something. But if you're in a position
where you can speak out politically and do so, then I
wouldn't be swayed by, you know, fears of name calling or what
have you. Eva, thank.
Thank you for that. I think there's something else
there, which you clearly have, which would be of benefit to
other people, and that is to have the courage to do those
things, to have the courage to stand up and speak out, have the
courage not to back down when the pressure starts.
But I absolutely take your point.
The last question might be a tricky one, but I asked Vanessa
Bailey this question and that was that.
If, if, if I could put you in a room with Israeli women, with
Israeli mothers, what would you say to them?
After all your experience. Of what's gone on in Palestine
and Gaza. I would say let's go together
to. Gaza, let's go together to
Nablus. Let's spend a week living with a
Palestinian family. I will guarantee your safety.
Let them see what it's really like living under occupation or
in the case of Gaza, under bombings.
I mean, I don't want to speak on behalf.
I can't possibly speak on. Behalf of all Israelis, I will
speak on behalf of experience of I've had and also like I was
saying at the beginning, this former Israeli soldier and what
he had to say about his own indoctrination.
And I've heard this time and again from Israelis and or
reading it, you know, as I mentioned the Breaking the
Silence type groups. There is a heavy amount of
indoctrination which can be powerful to those hearing it.
And I think from my experiences, Israelis are not permitted to
see the Palestinian side. And I think that if they were
permitted to sit down with Palestinians to hear what
they're living under, I think there would be compassion.
I I I think that the absence of information leads to judgment or
or fear or hatred or what have you.
But if they were able to, to go for again let's say not even a
time of bombing, let's let's go to Gaza when the war has stopped
and let's go talk with farmers, let's go talk with mothers,
let's go talk with young women who aspire to study abroad but
can't because they're locked down under siege.
I think that if I would hope that if Israeli.
Woman or other people. Who would other Israelis who
would be open to doing that, could hear these stories?
I think it could impact their understanding what they think
they understand about Palestinians.
I think there has been such a huge, huge operation of
dehumanization of Palestinians that you, I mean you see it from
the Israeli leadership unabashedly saying we don't
consider them human beings. If you, if you're hearing it
from your own leadership and you know, war propaganda heightens,
especially right now, it's it's more and more difficult for them
to humanize Palestinians. And I think that's what's really
missing for them. Excellent.
Thank you very much for that and and.
Maybe that answer also, I'm sure it does impacts on on your
comment about Russia and Ukraine and the fact that I believe if
we could, if we could stop the fighting and get people down to
talk, they would actually recognise that the Brotherhood
was greater than the the angst and the division which clearly
the West, the West has helped to sow in that region.
But very poignant comment, Eva, I've got to say, I've been
utterly fascinated by your commentaries and the journey
through your life. So I'm going to say thank you
very, very much for sharing that with me and the UK column
audience. There's a lot of the points that
you've raised that I'd like to ask more about and this
particular issue of, of how this vast worldwide propaganda
machine works and the the trouble that it causes.
I think we could have some really good discussion on that.
So I'm, I'm going to say if you feel that today's experience
hasn't been too bad and you might be able to join me again,
I'd. I'd very much like you to do
that. Oh, I would love to thank you
very much. You're an excellent.
Interviewer and listener. And you ask.
Wonderful, excellent, I should say questions.
So I would be very happy to to come on your show again.
OK, lovely. Thank you very much for that
well. Thank you for joining me today.