AMY GOODMAN: Do you think that the Israeli government should release prisoners?

SHLOMO BEN-AMI: Should release prisoners? Well, I think that these kind of situations require a sort of political approach, rather than military approach. You see, it's not that easy also to say that they should release prisoners, because that means that every Israeli citizen is a candidate to be taken hostage. The dilemma is not simple. I am for a political solution. These might perhaps take the form of, say -- that the quid pro quo from the point of view of Israel would have to be not to persist in the suffocation, the economic suffocation, of the Gaza Strip, the boycott to the Palestinian Authority. These kind of quid pro quos maybe we can reach through some sort of third party mediation. I’m not sure that exchanging prisoners will work, simply because this means exposing every Israeli citizen to being taken hostage.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think the Israeli government was wrong to reinvade Gaza?

SHLOMO BEN-AMI: Well, yes. I think it was wrong to do that, because -- if only for the reasons that affect the stability of the government itself. You see, the government is engaged now in this idea of disengagement from the West Bank. If the they invade the Gaza Strip, what they are going to show to the Israeli opinion and to public opinion, as a whole, is that disengagement, unilateral disengagement, doesn't work. If you do not coordinate things, either with the Palestinians or through a third party -- the Quartet, for example -- disengagement creates a frontline in a state of war, in a permanent state of war. And therefore, you'll have to reoccupy the territory, so what's the point in disengaging in such a manner? I think the government is exposing the fallacies of its own policy by occupying or reoccupying the Gaza Strip.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to Gaza right now, where Dr. Mona El-Farra is. She is a physician in northern Gaza, a health development consultant for the Union of Health Work Committees in Gaza. What is the situation on the ground right now, Dr. El-Farra?

DR. MONA EL-FARRA: Since the early hours of the morning, the Israeli army did not stop their sonic bombing against the Gaza Strip. They started the operation last night, 10:30. They targeted the infrastructure of the Gaza Strip. Two-thirds -- the main target was the electrical power plant. And now, two-thirds of Gaza Strip are with no electricity.

The population mood is angry, anxious, worried, scared. But despite all this, demonstrations are going in the streets against the release of the soldier, especially by the families of the political prisoners. This is the opinion, feeling.

And I have a comment here to say. There's no balance of power between the Israeli army and the militia or the resistance movement here in Gaza. Israeli knows that very well. So what's happening in Gaza now is collective punishment. I don't understand, why to destroy the infrastructure? Why to deprive the population from the electricity? It is collective punishment. This will not bring the soldier back.

What will bring the soldier back: negotiation, understanding the rights of Palestinian people to exist. The disengagement plan, for example, and the wall in the West Bank, all these measures Israel did to guarantee its security, it did not, anyway, because the security of Israel is not harmed by the resistance or largely harmed by the Palestinian resistance.

The mood is very bad in Gaza and angry. You can see twenty -- 2,000 people last night demonstrated in the middle camps of Gaza Strip against the release of the soldier, or the release of the soldier in swap of the political prisoners. People feel they are humiliated and Israel and the world wants us to kneel down. This is the mood of the people here now in Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: The issue of collective punishment, Shlomo Ben-Ami, former Foreign Minister of Israel, your response to that?

SHLOMO BEN-AMI: I am not favorable to collective punishment. But, you see, one needs to see the conditions on the ground. When Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip and then you have every day Kassam missiles being launched against an Israeli township, what would you do then? What is the answer to that? I mean, either to reoccupy the land or to open political negotiations, but that's, for example, President Abbas or even Ismael Haniyeh -- control all the factions in Gaza, do they control Islamic jihad? Do they control the martyrs of Al-Aqsa? So you have here a very serious problem.

We need sometimes to descend from the heights of the conceptual or even of the moral ground to see what can be done on the ground. So the problem is that the government has been trying all kind of ways to stop the launching of Kassam missiles. I’m sure that Ismael Haniyeh is not interested in these attacks. I’m sure that Mahmoud Abbas is not interested. Do they have the capacity to stop it? They don't have it, because the political system or the hierarchy of command, the chain of command, is invertibrate. So what is Israel to do in such a situation?

AMY GOODMAN: Ali Abunimah, your response?

ALI ABUNIMAH: Well, it's amazing, the rhetoric of Shlomo Ben-Ami, who knows much better. I’ve heard him expose the situation more eloquently, even on your show, Amy. He knows very well that this isn't about Gaza. This is about Israel's relentless assault on the Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories, its expansion of colonies and settlements in the occupied West Bank, and its announced annexation plan, which even he has criticized. But he's not against the annexation of the West Bank. What he believes, he's deluded in believing, is that Palestinians -- they can find Palestinians who will sit and agree to the annexation of Ma’ale Adumim, Ariel and all the settlements around the Occupied Territories.

What he has to realize and what all Israelis have to realize is that the age of colonialism has ended. He said, Shlomo Ben-Ami said, that the so-called convergence plan, the unilateral annexation plan, is Israeli's attempt to preempt the world recognizing that Israel is now a Jewish minority ruling over a Palestinian majority.

He wants to talk about the Quartet and the U.S. and doing things on the ground, because he doesn't want to talk about the big picture, that what is driving the conflict is the radical inequality between the Jewish minority, that rules all of the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and the disenfranchised Palestinian majority, who are paying the price for the luxury that Israel lives in, for the high incomes of Israelis, for the settlements, for the swimming pools, for the security in Tel Aviv and in Hertzliyah and in Jaffa and in Haifa and in Akka, that Israelis live a normal life all around the country, except in Sderot, where they experience the few dozen customs. But what pays for that normality for Israelis is the total disenfranchisement and dispossession of the majority population. And Israel believes that it can hide them behind walls, in ghettos, as was done to Jews in Europe in the 1930s and ‘40s.

And he should be a brave Israeli. He should speak out against the occupation. He should speak out against the apartheid laws inside Israel, not just in the West Bank. He should condemn the law that says that an Israeli citizen can marry anybody in the world, except a Palestinian, that an Israeli who marry a Palestinian has to leave the country. This is a new style of apartheid. It is even, as some have said, a new kind of Nuremberg law. And I’m waiting for Shlomo Ben-Ami to live up to his claimed liberal and progressive credentials and condemn these things and join the struggle to liberate not just Palestinians, but also Israelis, from this devastating system of oppression and apartheid, which will kill all of us --