The Electronic Intifada Podcast 14 July 2025
“It’s just acting with struts that are imposed by external forces that enable it to continue to exist,” he added.
Hever, author of The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation, says he faced criticism for prematurely saying the Israel economy was collapsing a year ago on The Electronic Intifada Livestream.
He admits he didn’t expect the Israeli economy or its genocide to last this long: “Because I didn’t anticipate the level of complicity from the West.”
Israel’s “complete lack of control over [its] own destiny” and its dependence on external support are two reasons why Hever says we are in “the zombie stage of the Israeli economy and society.”
Also, Israel’s budget was passed on 17 March with plans to transition funds away from war to urgent social and economic needs. But the next day Israel broke the ceasefire and so “The budget was a sham from the beginning,” said Hever.
We also covered Israel’s ongoing murders of Palestinians at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s so-called aid sites – nearly 800 have been killed and over 5,000 injured in the past six weeks.
Israel is also trying to revive its discredited 7 October mass rapes narrative, this time with British funding, as executive director Ali Abunimah and associate editor Asa Winstanley reported.
And after heavy losses in June, the Israeli military continued to lose soldiers amid stepped up resistance operations in Gaza, contributing editor Jon Elmer revealed in his report.
You can watch the whole program in the video at the top of this article.
Concentration camps for Gaza
Israel’s plans to force Palestinians into confined areas in the south of Gaza have drawn widespread condemnation, with Ehud Olmert, a former Israeli prime minister, likening it to Nazi concentration camps.
An official described the planned camp as “large tent city in Rafah where they will have hospitals and plenty of food” according to Haaretz.
The Boston Consulting Group “helped establish” the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The US firm “modeled the costs of ‘relocating’ Palestinians from Gaza and entered into a multimillion-dollar contract to help launch an aid scheme for the shattered enclave,” according to a report by The Financial Times.
Save the Children called the work that Boston Consulting Group has done with the GHF “utterly unacceptable.”
Watch or read associate editor Nora Barrows-Friedman’s Livestream news brief.
“Regime change” in Israel?
“We should not let ourselves be distracted,” by Israel’s war with Iran, Hever said. He emphasized that what really matters to Israel and Zionism is Palestine. “Because it’s a settler colony in the process of being decolonized,” he said.
According to Hever the timing of Netanyahu’s attack on Iran was driven by domestic political considerations.
In April, newly appointed Israeli army chief Eyal Zamir reportedly told the cabinet that they should abandon their “fantasies” about what they want to achieve in Gaza, because the military does not have enough soldiers to control the territory.
This increased pressure in Israel, including from soldiers, for the Ultra-Orthodox community, who are exempt from compulsory service, to be drafted into the army.
Ultra-Orthodox ministers called a no-confidence vote over the issue, threatening to bring down Netanyahu’s coalition government.
Hever says Netanyahu told them he was going to attack Iran and the Ultra-Orthodox would be called traitors and hunted in the streets if they voted against him.
According to The New York Times, Netanyahu leaked information about the top secret attack on Iran to Moshe Gafni, one of the Ultra-Orthodox party leaders, in order to dissuade him from proceeding with the no-confidence vote.
In the end, Netanyahu survived that vote on 12 June. Early in the morning of 13 June, Netanyahu started bombing Iran.
After the 12-day war, “You saw the biggest critics of Netanyahu writing articles that said: he’s our amazing strategic leader and he has saved us all,” according to Hever.
“And I think we’ve now entered a different stage in the Israeli system of government. Now the supreme leader of Israel rules like never before.”
In response to the question as to whether Netanyahu attacked Iran to do regime change, Hever said: “Yes, but not in Iran.”
BDS wins
Until recently Hever was coordinator of the military embargo campaign for the Palestinian Boycott National Committee (BNC). He shared some good news.
In June, Irish publication The Ditch, revealed that Spanish firm Sidenor had been selling steel to Elbit, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer.
Less than a month later, Sidenor announced it was suspending steel sales to Israel through Barcelona port.
Also on 10 June, a report revealed that France has been shipping weapons to Israel through Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, including parts for US-made F-35 warplanes.
Some of the military equipment was transported aboard an Air France flight.
The French union SUD Arien Solidaires announced its members’ refusal to handle military material destined for Israel.
In contrast with a few years ago, “we’re now at a stage where we don’t need to start from the beginning and explain why it’s illegal to trade weapons with Israel,” according to Hever. “Everyone knows it by now. it’s just a question of exposing it.”
Israel tries to revive mass rapes hoax
Israel is trying to revive its discredited 7 October mass rapes hoax.
A new report by the Dinah Project, a British-government funded Israeli organization, claims to be “the most comprehensive assessment to date of the sexual violence that occurred during and after the attack.”
But after reading it Abunimah and Winstanley found nothing to substantiate the central claim of the report: that Hamas organized, ordered and implemented a mass rape campaign on and after 7 October.
“It includes no firsthand testimony of any rape,” Abunimah said.
Rather, it is a rehash of uncorroborated or already debunked accounts.
The few new elements include very little detail and no evidence. The report relies on supposed witnesses, including members of the “first responder” group ZAKA, who are proven liars.
In contrast to this total lack of evidence, there are reports from UN agencies and independent human rights organizations containing extensive evidence of rape and other sexual violence by Israelis against Palestinians in torture camps, including first-hand accounts.
“And that is given absolutely no airtime,” noted Barrows-Friedman.
The Israeli report suggests lowering legal standards in order to make up for the lack of evidence, according to Winstanley.
That includes: transitioning “from a victim-centered evidentiary model to a broader approach that accounts for the systematic silencing of victims.”
Winstanley called this “jargon” aimed at obscuring the fact that, to date, Israel has still not identified a single victim, living or dead, of a 7 October 2023 rape.
The report also suggests that individual Palestinians should “bear responsibility for the full range of atrocities committed as part of that assault even if they did not personally commit each specific act” in other words it attempts to legitimize the type of collective punishment and guilt Israel already uses against Palestinians.
The Dinah Project is named after a Bible story where Jacob’s sons massacre all the men and boys in Shechem – modern-day Nablus – and take all the women and girls into slavery in retaliation for the rape of Jacob’s daughter. Even secular Israelis “knowingly chose to name their project after a genocidal Bible story,” said Winstanley.
“Israel’s feminists are treating the mass rape hoax as a warrant for genocide,” Winstanley concluded.
Resistance surge
“Israel’s plans are often and continually thwarted by the resistance,” said contributing editor Jon Elmer speaking on the Livestream about Israel’s plan to force Palestinians south into Rafah.
June was one of the deadliest months for Israel in Gaza and July has continued that trend according to Elmer. He counted 30 operations against Israeli vehicles in Khan Younis in one week from 3 July to 10 July alone.
One complex deadly operation exposed to the Israeli public the Israeli army’s lie that it controls that area of Gaza. “They clearly do not,” Elmer said.
One of the resistance’s deadliest attacks also happened last week in the northern town of Beit Hanoun: at least five Israeli soldiers were killed and 14 wounded.
To comply with YouTube’s standards, The Electronic Intifada has to edit resistance videos shown during the Livestream. You can watch the uncensored videos on Elmer’s X account.
You can watch the program on YouTube, Rumble or Twitter/X, or you can listen to it on your preferred podcast platform.
Tamara Nassar produced and directed the program. Michael F. Brown contributed pre-production assistance and this writer contributed post-production assistance.
Past episodes of The Electronic Intifada Livestream can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
Ali Abunimah contributed reporting for this article.
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