AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

The United Nations, as well as many Arab nations, have condemned Israel for cutting off all food and humanitarian aid into Gaza. Egypt and Qatar accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the blockade in an attempt to pressure Hamas to agree to a new proposal by the United States that would force Hamas to release all remaining hostages without Israeli soldiers fully withdrawing from Gaza. Hamas has accused Israel of trying to derail the original ceasefire agreement. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke Sunday.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] Hamas currently controls all of the supplies and goods that are being sent to the Gaza Strip. It is abusing the Gaza population that is trying to receive the aid. It is shooting at them and is turning the humanitarian aid into a budget for terrorism directed against us. To this, we will not agree in any way.

AMY GOODMAN: Over the past two days, Israeli troops have killed at least nine Palestinians in Gaza. Palestinians there have denounced the new Israeli blockade.

HISHAM NAGI: [translated] Suffering will increase after the occupation’s decision to close the crossings. Frankly, since the beginning of the war, they have been trying to starve us, and we fear the people will starve due to the lack of aid and food supplies. Additionally, people are afraid of the return of war and facing death again. Isn’t it enough that the occupation has killed 50,000 or 60,000 martyrs so far?

AMY GOODMAN: We continue our conversation with Ken Roth, visiting professor at Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, served for almost 30 years as executive director of Human Rights Watch. He has a new book out. It’s called Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments.

So, Israel has just blocked all humanitarian aid from going into Gaza. Your response?

KENNETH ROTH: Well, first, this is a continuation of the starvation strategy that Israel has been pursuing against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, which is a war crime, which was the reason that Netanyahu and the former Defense Minister Gallant were charged by the International Criminal Court with war crimes. Second, the fact that Israel is turning on and off the spigot is actually evidence of the deliberateness of the starvation strategy, because during the war, Israel kept saying, “Oh, what do you mean? We’re letting in the food. It’s just — you know, it’s Hamas’s fault,” when it’s absolutely clear that Israel just shuts the door sometimes, even when, you know, during the bulk of the war, Palestinians were facing near famine and certainly starvation. So, you know, this is, in a sense, further evidence against Netanyahu.

Now, what he’s trying to do, as you just alluded to, is change the terms of the ceasefire negotiations, because the temporary ceasefire, the initial six weeks, have now come to an end. And stage two was supposed to be Israeli forces fully pulling out of Gaza, an end to the war, and then further exchanges of hostages and Israeli, Palestinian — you know, Palestinians who are held as prisoners by Israel. And Netanyahu is saying, “No, just give us the hostages, but we’re not going to do the other part. And we’re going to starve you until you agree.” So, that’s the context in which this is happening.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting. We just spent our last segment talking about Ukraine and President Trump trying to pressure Zelensky, basically saying, “You would be no one if it weren’t for the United States giving you weapons.” What about his very dear ally and close friend, Netanyahu, the amount of what these 2,000-pound bombs mean, what the amount, from Biden through Trump, the military arming of Israel to facilitate what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank?

KENNETH ROTH: Well, I think we have to understand that the U.S. was aiding and abetting massive war crimes — indeed, arguably, genocide. And Biden continued the arms sales, continued the military aid, despite abundant evidence that these war crimes were taking place. The one thing Biden did that was good is that he withheld the 2,000-pound bombs. He suspended their delivery, because these were being used to devastate Palestinian communities in Gaza. A 2,000-pound bomb can basically kill anybody within the radius of two football fields. These are utterly inappropriate to be used in heavily populated areas. This is indiscriminate warfare, a war crime. And Trump just renewed them: “Here, take them. Do whatever you want.” So, if the fighting resumes, Trump also could be accused of aiding and abetting war crimes.

I think, though, the real risk for Trump is that he has now imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court prosecutor, Karim Khan. And that is a blatant violation of Article 70 of the Rome Statute, the ICC’s guiding treaty, which criminalizes obstruction of justice, intimidating or threatening a court official for their official duties. And, you know, will Karim Khan charge Trump? I don’t know. He didn’t do that — the prior prosecutor didn’t do that when Trump imposed sanctions on her. But, you know, Karim Khan is a different guy. And if Trump continues to play this incredibly obstructive role, it wouldn’t surprise me if he suddenly faces criminal charges, too. And people can say, “Well, who would arrest Trump?” But what it would mean is that the 125 member states of the ICC suddenly would be obliged to arrest him if he showed up. So they would tell him, “Don’t show up.” And his world would suddenly be a lot smaller, similar to what Putin now faces, when, for example, he couldn’t go to the BRICS summit in South Africa for fear of arrest.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you have a chapter in your book, Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments, on war crimes. Can you talk about what has happened to the whole issue of international — you’re fiercely critical, you were, of Biden, and now of President Trump, when, as we look right now, you’re looking at Israel, Gaza and the West Bank — the complete shutting down or disregard for international criminal law, whether we’re talking about the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court or human rights law since World War II and why it was established?

KENNETH ROTH: Well, first, I think it’s important to stress that international humanitarian law or the laws of war, it was not written by human rights groups, this kind of pie-in-the-sky standard. This was written by the world’s militaries. They decided that this is the best way to fight war to try to spare civilians, not to replicate the mass atrocities of the Second World War.

So, Human Rights Watch and our allies tries to uphold that law. Clearly, it is flouted by Israel, by the Sudanese fighters, by Putin in Ukraine, by the Myanmar junta. So there are examples of systematic war crimes. But most governments still formally uphold these standards. Their militaries abide by them. And this is where something like the International Criminal Court is very important, because, you know, yes, you always have crimes, but to have a court come in and say, “You’re going to be prosecuted for these crimes,” helps to resurrect the standards.

So this is a battle. And that’s one of the things I really stress in the book, that, you know, the defense of human rights requires persistent pressure. Governments are always tempted to violate human rights. And our job in the human rights community is to push back, you know, to change the cost-benefit calculus of repression. And, you know, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but there are repeated cases in the book where we win, where the pressure worked.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, there’s an amazing moment now. The office of government efficiency, if you’re really looking at huge sums of money, Guantánamo, what, 15 men are being held there, many of them without charge, and it costs half a billion dollars to keep it open on this extrajudicial area that the U.S. controls in Cuba. And now, in order to keep it open, they’re talking about sending migrants there, immigrants who have come into this country.

KENNETH ROTH: Yeah, I mean, I go into Guantánamo at length in the book. And in many ways, I view that as a success of the human rights movement, because we really did stop the Bush-era torture. We got legislation adopted that shut down the various loopholes that Bush was using. Guantánamo gradually has been depopulated. No one has been added to it in a criminal sense. You know, these migrants who are being put there are being put in a different part of the island and are not really changing the extreme cost.

AMY GOODMAN: Though tens of thousands of them could be put there if the Trump administration has their way.

KENNETH ROTH: Yeah, and I don’t think the courts are going to allow it, because I think there really are legislative obstacles to taking immigrants in the United States and just putting them in this extraterritorial area. But, you know, I think that the fact that Guantánamo was so stigmatized, that this idea of endless detention without trial for so-called enemy combatants was a legal theory that just didn’t hold, was, in an odd way, a success of the human rights movement. And even though we haven’t completely shut it down, we made huge progress in making it unusable for criminal purposes.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to Gaza and then to your own life experience, your family. There was a history made last night. You had a Palestinian filmmaker and an Israeli filmmaker winning the best documentary category. It’s the first time a Palestinian has won. After Basel Adra spoke, Yuval Abraham, the Israeli journalist, spoke. He said — well, this is the end of what Yuval Abraham said. They’re saying something like a billion people watched. This is of his message.

YUVAL ABRAHAM: There is a different path: a political solution without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people. And I have to say, as I am here: The foreign policy in this country is helping to block this path. And, you know, why? Can’t you see that we are intertwined, that my people can be truly safe if Basel’s people are truly free and safe? There is another way. It’s not too late for life, for the living. There is no other way. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: As they held their Oscars, Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra, this incredible moment. And you hear the applause. I mean, the change of public opinion in the United States — there’s a global audience, but we heard the audience in that room. If you can talk about the power of the U.S. and also your own life experience, where you come from? You are — well, talk about your life and your parents.

KENNETH ROTH: OK, well, Amy, I really got into the defense of human rights because of the experience of my father. He grew up in Nazi Germany and fled Frankfurt as a 12-year-old boy in July 1938 for New York. And so, I grew up with Hitler stories. You know, I grew up with what it was like to be a young boy living under the Nazis, and became very aware of the evil that governments could do, and was determined to try to prevent a recurrence of that kind of evil. Now, you know, I don’t compare other situations to the Nazis. You know, they were pretty sui generis.

But Yuval Abraham, what he’s talking about today is that there really, you know, traditionally, have been three options on the table for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One is recognition that the settlement project is so advanced that a Palestinian state is impossible, and therefore you have a so-called one-state reality between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and there, everybody should have equal rights. But, of course, the Israeli government doesn’t want that, because there are roughly the same number of Jews and Arabs, and they would lose their Jewish majority.

AMY GOODMAN: And if anyone talks about “from the river to the sea,” they’re accused of antisemitism.

KENNETH ROTH: Yeah, although that’s silly, because it depends what you add to that. If you say, “From the river to the sea, there should be no Israel,” then, fine, that’s antisemitism. If you say, “From the river to the sea, there should be equal rights for everybody or two states living side by side,” that’s perfectly fine. So, it’s silly to say “river to the sea” is a problem. It depends what you add onto it.

But, you know, the second option, which is what the Israeli government wants, is to have the endless occupation, the status quo. But that is now broadly recognized as apartheid and unsustainable.

So, the third option, which I think is the best option, is from the river to the sea to have two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side. But Netanyahu says, you know, “Over my dead body.”

The fourth option, that is always sitting on the side, was never really considered legitimate, but Trump just tried to legitimize, was to solve the Palestinian problem by getting rid of the Palestinians. Start with Gaza, get rid of 2 million there. And then, what No Other Land shows is the beginning of ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank, as well. Now, this would be a blatant war crime. It is utterly unacceptable. Fortunately, the Arab states have said, “No way. We are not going to be complicit in another Nakba.” So I’m hopeful that that’s off the table.

And again, if you come back to Trump, the master negotiator, if he wants his big regional deal, if he wants the Saudis to normalize relations with the Israelis, he’s got to push Netanyahu to accept a Palestinian state. We’ve seen he can twist Netanyahu’s arm. That’s how he got the current temporary ceasefire. He’s got to twist that arm harder to get acceptance of what I think is really the only viable long-term solution.

AMY GOODMAN: And certainly, there are those who feel the way you do: A two-state solution is the only viable one. There are those who feel only a one-state solution would be viable, and are not antisemitic.

KENNETH ROTH: Yeah, you know, I mean, to say a one-state solution because the Israeli settlement project has made it really hard to have a Palestinian state, but within that one state, we don’t want apartheid, we want equal rights, that’s just justice. You know, that’s not antisemitism. But I still think finding some way to have the two states would be better, but I could live with the one state as long as it’s one state with equal rights, not one state with apartheid for the Occupied Territories.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about the crackdown in the United States and what you see, even going back to your family. I mean, you’re now a professor at Princeton. The thousands of students who are being expelled or suspended, they’re going through court trials now around the country, professors being fired. And then you look at what’s happening in Germany, amazingly, when people criticize Israel. I mean, Jewish Holocaust survivors criticizing Israel are told they cannot speak. They cannot address student assemblies, for example.

KENNETH ROTH: Yeah, no, in Germany, they have this concept called the Staatsräson, which really means the “reason of the state.” And understandably, to make amends for the Holocaust, Germany feels they have to do something. But they’ve interpreted that to mean just defend the Israeli government, regardless of what it does, which I think is a huge mistake. What I’ve written about, actually, in the German press is that they should take from the Holocaust the importance of upholding rights that would prevent atrocities like this from ever happening again. But you can’t uphold rights and have a Palestinian exception, because then, you know, next there will be a Jewish exception, and then there will be an exception for other people. And so, the only way to do it is to uphold rights for everybody. That’s not the German government’s approach. They just think they’re going to defend Netanyahu and the far-right extremists in the Israeli government, regardless of what they do. I think that’s a misunderstanding of the proper lessons of the Holocaust.

AMY GOODMAN: And I think that’s clear from your book, the overall message. “Never again” means never again for anyone, anywhere. Righting Wrongs is Kenneth Roth’s new book, Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments. Kenneth Roth is now a visiting professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, served for nearly three decades as the executive director of Human Rights Watch.

This is Democracy Now! To see the full speeches of the Palestinian-Israeli directors of No Other Land, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.