06/17/09 – Philip Weiss – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, TX, I'm Scott Horton, this is Antiwar Radio.
Alright everybody, welcome to the show, Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, TX.
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I'm going to go ahead and get the show started with our first interview today.
It's Philip Weiss from the Mondo Weiss blog, a long-time journalist for the New York Observer and all kinds of other places.
Welcome back to the show, Phil, how are you doing?
Good, Scott, how are you?
I'm doing great.
Let's start with Benjamin Netanyahu's speech.
I guess there's been a lot of coverage of Barack Obama's speech in Cairo and his statements and Hillary Clinton's statements about their seriousness, about stopping at least the expansion of settlements in the West Bank.
But what did you make of Benjamin Netanyahu's speech that he gave the other day in reaction?
You know, I mean, I was very disappointed with it just because I'm hoping for some change in the Israeli position of a profound character and that was not there.
The general reaction inside Israel from observers, which is sort of more interesting than my own reaction, is squares with that.
People said, hey, it was a tiny step by him saying a Palestinian state, which, by the way, he was saying six years ago a limited Palestinian state.
He's still saying a limited Palestinian state.
And also in Israel there was some concern that he was swaddling this concession in so much right-wing rhetoric designed to keep his coalition together.
And so it was a speech that was cast on the one hand toward Obama to sort of say, I'm trying to do something here, baby.
Not very much.
And on the other, more to his own constituency, saying we, the Jewish people, have an ancient right through the Bible to this land.
We have a right to this land.
The Jewish people have a right to this land.
Oh, the Palestinians happen to be here.
Oh, we have a biblical connection to this land.
So I found all that kind of biblical talk about the Jewish people a little concerning, especially because I'm part of the Jewish people living fine right here.
And I think it is probably concerning to the general issue that you're laying out here.
I think the Obama administration has got to be a little concerned this guy doesn't get it, that there's got to be some real movement here.
And his political coalition doesn't allow him to move forward.
Well, yeah, that's the thing.
Even if Netanyahu, you know, somehow could be brought around to, say, George Mitchell's point of view on the situation, he really can't do anything without losing his power in Israel, as it is anyway.
Apparently.
I mean, on the one hand, I mean, the three options are resign, you know, go with Obama, or go with his own coalition.
And he has sort of tried to straddle that a little bit, but mostly toward his own coalition.
And I don't think it's going to work in the long run.
I think there's got to be, if the end result is a two-state solution, and a two-state solution has to have some degree of justice toward the Palestinians who have been dealt nothing but kind of unfairness for 61 years, well, then there's got to be some more movement in the Israeli position.
And Obama knows that.
Obama knows that, and so does Hillary.
And it seems like there's a real conflict here between what everybody knows has to be done, and, well, like you said, the basis of the whole speech basically was, you know, we have this 2,000-year-old book that says so.
And yet, I mean, to be realistic here, if we're not talking about magic, but we're just talking about, you know, human relationships and that kind of thing, 2,000-year-old property rights are kind of worn out.
I mean, if the Jews were put into exile by the Romans back then...
Yeah.
I love it when you say magic, Scott.
I forgot.
You know, the last time we had this conversation, you brought in the magic.
I love it.
I love it.
It's magic, yeah.
Well, I mean, I don't mean to belittle people's religious beliefs.
I mean, you know, I guess I probably am.
But, you know, what I'm saying is, just in human terms, those property rights are expired.
To say that a bunch of people who are Europeans, I mean, what we're talking about here is like a basic case of white supremacy.
If you drop the religions, you know, you're talking about European colonists in the Middle East.
And to have Netanyahu's entire speech just basically where he's only got his one excuse is it says in the Bible, and we're the sons of Abraham and whatever.
But, of course, even that argument doesn't hold water, because all the Arabs are Semites, too, right?
I mean...
Somewhat.
I mean, the one...
I guess I'd make a couple of... my own view is somewhat different from yours in minor respects.
But one is that, you know, you can't... the Jewish persecution in Europe was part of that story.
It doesn't justify landing the Holocaust as an issue on the Arab world.
But certainly that drove... the Zionist vision was driven by fears of expulsion, et cetera, and ultimately extermination in Europe.
Right, and he does bring that up, but...
Yeah, but Netanyahu brings that...
I mean, the problem is that, you know, Israel happened after the Holocaust, which, you know, Netanyahu continues to invoke the Holocaust, saying it wouldn't have happened if Israel had been around.
Well, you know, it's... that's a... that is a very old narrative to be bringing, as you say, to real people today.
What is the actual condition right now?
And I think that is what's horrifying.
This is why I'm engaged with this issue, because the condition of the Palestinians is horrifying, and it's causing my country, the United States, tremendous amount of grief across the Arab world, and it's not going away.
I mean, it's...
But I think on your basis, we can have a reasonable argument, and, you know, this is what Obama said in Cairo.
He didn't say the Bible gives this land to the Jews.
No.
He said, listen, there was a Holocaust, I'm not here to argue with you about it, I'm just telling you, that's why we will always support Israel, that's why there has to be an Israel, and if you don't like it, tough.
Yeah, amazing.
And so, you know, that's...
It was interesting.
It's not necessarily fair from an Arab point of view, but at least we're talking about, you know, actual time and space where people exist here on Earth, and not religious edicts from 2,000 years back in time.
Yeah.
I mean, that's fascinating.
I agree with you entirely, Scott.
I was in Cairo.
I happened to be in that hall for that.
It was really one of the privileges of my lifetime, and, you know, to watch, you know, 2,000 Arabs, Egyptians, sitting there in silence as he spoke about the Holocaust, you know, I think not entirely pleased, not pleased by the fact that he was going to Buchenwald to balance things the next day, but just overjoyed by his recognition of Palestinian dislocation in 1948, and none of the religious mumbo-jumbo, as you said.
And the spirit of the Arab street, you know, here I am, an American, I can't speak a word of Arabic.
I mean, I can speak a few words of Arabic, but I went out into the streets of Cairo and just spoke to many English speakers, and just the kind of joy at recognition, the sense of fairness.
And I don't think these people, I mean, let's leave the Palestinians out of the picture for just a moment here.
I don't think the Egyptians begrudge Israel its presence there, even, if there's a recognition of the Palestinian suffering and an effort to deal fairly with the Palestinians.
Now, I think Palestinians are the voters, ultimately, when it comes to what is fairness.
You know, American Jews aren't going to do that.
Egyptian Arabs are not going to do that.
You know, it's Palestinians who have to be included in this conversation.
But I was just deeply moved by how much Obama's words calmed this sort of ancient struggle, you know, since the Crusades, between these two worlds.
And, you know, even the Mossadegh, I mean, you think of so many statements in there that I wish it had been more concrete and forward-moving, but it was visionary in that it included things, it put aside, it put behind us, in a way, things like the Nakba.
It didn't put it behind.
It acknowledged the Nakba.
It acknowledged the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953.
It acknowledged that Jerusalem should be an open city.
The Nakba, that means the expulsion of the Arabs.
Yes, when Israel was created in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians lost their homes in great waves of ethnic cleansing.
And that created the refugee problem that is with us to this day.
Yes, I think that was the part of the Netanyahu speech that was the most ironic to me, was, you know, we're a bunch of Russians and Germans and whatever, European immigrants, and we have an ancient birthright to this land.
The people who lived here, they have no right whatsoever.
He refers specifically to the right of return and how that can never be.
Yes, it's very insulting.
Very insulting.
Okay, so now let's talk about where the rubber meets the road.
Because, you know, Jimmy Carter gave a great interview to Haaretz where he said, listen, Obama threw the gauntlet down there in Cairo.
He can't back down from that.
He says he wants a Palestinian state and he's going to stop the expansion of settlements.
That has to happen.
But, you know, it seems to me like from the maps I've seen of the West Bank, the IDF would have to tear down at least three quarters or something of those settlements in order for there to be any such thing as a contiguous territory there in the West Bank at all.
Tear down all those walls and everything.
So we're really a long way from even discussing that kind of thing, right?
Yes, I mean, the thing is, absolutely we are.
I think that the great advance that's happened, though, is that finally, you know, six months ago I was trying to talk about settlements.
You know, I'm a long-time journalist, as you observed.
I work for the mainstream press a lot.
Now I have a blog.
So I'm sort of in both worlds, although more in the Internet world now.
And I try to get, you know, I get work from the mainstream world still.
I tried to sell that settlement story six months ago because we discovered a tax-deductible charity in the United States that serves the militia needs of settlers in the West Bank.
And they get tons of money from American Jews to support these settlements.
You know, no publication was interested in that story.
And I think that, you know, one of the great things that's happened here is that settlements is finally in the news, this thing that should have been in the news 30 years ago when the process was really beginning and American presidents opposed it.
It's never been in the news.
And so finally it's in the news.
So, Scott, I take your point absolutely.
If you look at the West Bank, how can you have a real state in this place that is so perforated and invaded and colonized by settlers, you know, close to half a million of them all told?
And, you know, it's going to be, I question that.
I just don't understand how, without doing just what you said, uprooting, you know, more than half of them, that you're going to get anything that's potentially governable.
But at least the issue of settlements is finally in the American press and in the American mind, and then we can move on to...
I would urge journalists, the next step is really look at Palestinian lives.
Look what their lives are like with those checkpoints.
Look what it takes, look what it is involved to drive from Ramallah to Bethlehem.
You know, just sort of like the drive from, you know, New York to Long Island, New York City or Manhattan to Queens.
That's what it should be like.
It should be a, you know, 45-minute, one-hour drive or, you know, depending.
And I'm not going to get these facts out.
And it's hours, it's crazy because you have to drive all around these settlements.
It's just not right.
And, you know, especially when you consider that Jerusalem is a holy city to three great religions, and you and I probably share a view of religion as magic, but, you know, God knows a lot of people love their religion.
You've got to honor that.
I just don't.
I think these are the realities, as you point out, again, these are the realities for real people that our country has shut out, and we have to start looking at it.
That's my faith and hope here is that that process has begun of looking at what's going on there.
Well, and, I mean, you're right.
That's what it's all about.
We've got to hope is that an open discussion at least will lead to, you know, the truth and the right decisions being made and that kind of thing.
You know, I wonder, a lot of people say that, and I guess this is completely intolerable from the Likudas point of view, but, you know, people have suggested before, why not just have one state?
If we recognize that they're never really going to give up the West Bank and Gaza, why not just let all those people in the West Bank and Gaza be Israeli Arabs, like the rest of the Israeli Arabs?
The only answer, the only real reason why not is because then they'd be the majority, right, or soon enough.
That's right.
That's right.
And, you know, myself, that's really where my politics are.
I want there to be one democratic state in what is now Israel and in Palestine, and I think that any American liberal really has to believe that.
But I guess, you know, having just been in Gaza, the one thing I felt more than anything was that these people are persecuted.
They are just completely persecuted.
They have no freedom of movement.
They have no dreams.
They're treated, as Jimmy Carter said, like animals.
And anything, anything that alleviates that suffering, I'm for.
So I guess my feeling right now is that there seems to be some realistic hope for a two-state solution that has some degree of justice in it.
And myself, I'm sort of for that right now.
I am for that right now because I think a constituency exists.
But even if a two-state solution is achieved, it doesn't end the civil rights struggle within Israel for Israeli Arabs, and I don't think that it ends a kind of a regional struggle for sort of neighborliness and reconciliation and acceptance of the other.
I saw tremendous hatred toward Israelis and even Jews in Gaza, and I know that there's tremendous hatred in Israel toward Palestinians and separation from them.
That's the kind of healing that has to take place regardless.
But the answer to your question is yes.
As liberal Democrats or people who believe in a multicultural democracy in the United States, how can we be against those values in the Middle East and be for separation on a religious and racial basis just so one group maintains its majority?
It's gerrymandering of the kind of the ugliest sort.
Well, you know, and this is, I guess, a pretty controversial topic, but it's something that you brought up on your blog recently, is the question of whether Israel really is part of the West and whether those basic Jeffersonian kind of values that we define our society by, that everybody's an individual and rule number one is that they own their own life and you can't just go around taking their rights away from them and so forth.
That seems to really kind of be in question, doesn't it?
I mean, Israel, geographically, it's not the West, although it may be the western part of that kind of the region.
It's the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea.
A vast proportion of the population there are from Eastern Europe, from Russia.
And I read a thing in Haaretz last week where a rabbi was quoted explaining that.
He says right here in the holy book, when you're at war against your enemies, you should kill their women and their children too.
And he specifically cited western values as being irrelevant and said, you know, I don't know why anyone thinks we should go by these weird values of the West.
That's not our view.
And I just wonder, you know, maybe we should just leave Israel to the Middle East.
Maybe it really is just an oriental culture and they are still in pre-John Locke days there and this should have nothing to do with it at all.
That's a fascinating question.
I mean, first, to be precise about one thing, you know, you fly into Israel and you look at that little map in the seat pocket of the plane and you notice Jerusalem is 500 miles east of Istanbul, you know.
They keep saying they're a western democracy.
You are really going pretty far east.
So your geographical point is absolutely true.
You're in the heart of the Arab world, although the Arab world includes a great amount of diversity and always has.
As to the second point, you know, I think to take this bit by bit, Israel is in a war with itself spiritually right now.
And the rabbi you quoted is on one side and then there are secular westerners like myself who made an emigration.
But the Jews, very much like me, emigrated there to create a kind of a western democracy.
I think these people are at war with each other and the seculars are leaving.
Israel faces a crisis of its soul.
The larger point you made, you know, I guess it's a wager.
Look what's happening in Iran.
I think that, you know, certain values or universal values are held worldwide and Iran seems to be changing.
Iran is evolving.
Israel evolves.
I hope that, you know, all the world embraces, you know, what am I smoking?
I can give you some later.
But, you know, I do hope that, you know, all the world begins to embrace more liberal values and that the internet is going to be a player in all that.
Do you ever have those kinds of visions, Scott?
Yeah, I mean, this is my whole thing is that we ought to, you know, I guess I am kind of a neocon this way or whatever.
I believe that my libertarian ideology is superior and I want to cram it down everybody's throat really just by talking loud.
I don't ever want to use violence on anybody because obviously that's counterproductive to the very principles I'm trying to espouse.
But, yeah, I think that the whole thing about I can't prove it but it's self-evident to me and that's good enough for me and I don't care whether it's good enough for you.
It's self-evident to me that I was born free and I have a musket.
And what are you going to do about it?
I think that that ought to be the principle of every person on earth, ought to be an individualist like that.
And I think that the best way to spread those kinds of libertarian lessons is through voluntary exchange, fax machines and text messages and iPods full of audio books.
And, you know, it's actually great.
I just got a message on my Facebook page the other day from a guy from Estonia who is a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist.
Now, nobody invaded his country and regime-changed his country and forced them to become like the West.
He's been reading Rothbard and learning about those libertarian principles.
And that's how you spread freedom around if that's what we're really after is you put John Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government on audio book MP3 format and put it on iPods and send them out to the winds.
Well, that's fascinating.
I mean, I'm more of a socialist than you are, let me be clear, but I do agree with you that ideas now are available to people and they can choose those ideas or not choose those ideas and at some point they bear some responsibility for the societies that they're in.
I mean, I was troubled in Egypt by the degree of authoritarianism there.
And that authoritarianism exists, you know, to some degree even in the social sphere.
You know, I felt that the degree of social control you see with the women's role, you know, I'm not wild about that.
And I share a kind of a Western superior feeling about it, but God knows we're not going to change those social values by imposing them on anybody.
We have to do, you know, Obama, that was a great thing about his speech.
He brought up women's freedom in that.
He said that women should be free to wear what they want and that he respects women who wear the hijab.
You know, I just think that that kind of tolerance is the way that, I mean, myself, I think that degree of tolerance is what can help spread these values that I guess I agree with you are more evolved.
Well, now, you say that the more Westernized and more secular Jews are just fleeing Israel now?
They're turning the whole place over to the Avigdor Liebermans of the place?
That's a little dramatic.
What is true is that the more secular Jews are turning to the West, and Israel is, Israel, here's what's true.
I haven't been there, so I don't know what it feels like there.
What I know to be true from journalism is that something on the order of 700,000 to a million Israelis are now living in Europe and the West in what is described as a reverse aliyah.
They are taking jobs in the West.
They are taking jobs in Europe.
They are opting out of that society for professional reasons, largely, but maybe also for spiritual and political reasons.
I haven't, excuse me, polled these people, but the issue is which neoconservatives and more religious types recognize is that Israel is being transformed, and that this kind of vision of a liberal democracy that it always had, it now has surprisingly large blocks of right-wing religious characters in it, and that's the Avigdor Lieberman number, which keeps going.
Avigdor Lieberman got bigger numbers in parliament.
His Yisrael Bteinu party then did labor, and labor is what built that country.
Labor is the kind of European Ashkenazi liberal Zionist.
That's pretty interesting.
Well, it's strange, too, because the Lieberman types, they're not the religious types.
They're more like the National Socialists.
Oh, that's right.
Then you have the Orthodox on top of that, so you have these blocks that are working together, absolutely.
A lot of the Lieberman types, religion doesn't mean anything to them, any more than religion meant that much to the labor Zionists initially.
Wow.
Let's see here.
We have a few more minutes here on the phone with Philip Weiss from the Mondo Weiss blog.
Let me ask you about Dennis Ross getting kicked upstairs from the State Department where he was supposed to be in charge of Iran policy.
What have you heard about that?
You know, I'm just listening to what other people are saying on that.
It's hard for me to know what's going on.
I mean, Dennis Ross, who is a longtime chieftain in the Yisrael lobby and has been in one administration after another, regardless of whether it's Republican or Democrat, the guy can just shapeshift because he has such a power base outside the administration.
The conservative Jewish organizations and Jewish leadership loves him, so you have that have gone well travel.
Dennis Ross shows up again in the Obama administration after being in Bush I and Clinton and I think a little in Bush II, too.
So here he shows up and he's assigned the Iran desk or Southwest Asia, which people understood to be Iran, in the State Department.
He's made very militant statements about Iran in the past, and suddenly he's taken off that job and he's going to the National Security Council.
So no one is entirely sure how to read Obama.
He's such a cards-to-the-chest political shrewdy, just a tremendous politician.
But there's speculation that Ross has been kicked upstairs.
They don't want him to – that there have been complaints about him handling Iran with the background that he has.
I mean, who knows what's going on in the back corridors on this one, but it does seem that he's been taken off the Iran beat and maybe given a little more power in the National Security Council, but taken away from the hot stove of sort of evolving policy in the Middle East.
And I think that's good news, and it's also clever of Obama to keep such a central figure in the Israel lobby in-house.
He knows how to play the Israel lobby.
He knows that the Israel lobby is a central factor in his political existence, and Obama seems to be playing the lobby better than anyone.
I mean, note that a year ago he went to AIPAC and said, Jerusalem must never be divided.
It must be Jewish, a horrifying statement.
And a year later he goes to Cairo and says, I imagine Jerusalem with all the faith intermingling.
So Obama will say anything when he needs to politically to deal with the lobby, and yet when push comes to shove, he, I think, is going to try to change the lobby.
He's got a very strong Jewish support, which is the greatest thing he's got going for him in this issue from a political standpoint, and he's going to help to transform the Israel lobby.
Well, and that's an important point, too, is that, well, as you said, so many of the liberal Jews leaving Israel and coming to the West here in America, I guess whether that includes those immigrants or not, the Jews here are finding they have an alternative to AIPAC.
There's an Israel lobby that they can support that does not just carry water for Benjamin Netanyahu.
Yeah, but though, you know, like you and me are radical liberals in our way, and, you know, I blame the Jewish leadership on the Jewish community.
I mean, I don't think Jews can escape responsibility for a Jewish leadership that has said yes to settlements for 30 years.
American Jewish leadership has signed off on settlements.
This wicked policy my community has signed off on, and that is changing.
I am so proud of my community that finally a liberal, progressive voice is asserting itself and taking on Israel on this, and Obama is playing to that, and that is a change, and that's a great change, and you notice, I mean, Hillary, here's Hillary who has gold-plated cred with the Jewish community, and, you know, she's taking a stiff line on settlements, and it's sort of a sign that there's some real changes underfoot.
Well, and, yeah, I guess it's been in the news, too, right, that J Street, if you're a congressperson and AIPAC decides they don't like you anymore, you can go to J Street, and they will try to find you some money to, you know, counteract that, and that's something that's had, you know, already I think there's a chilling effect from that.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
That's fascinating.
I think it really is happening that there's some real money.
That's the issue, is there real money for this position, and I think there will be real money.
Okay, and now, I'm sorry, because I meant to ask you before, but we got sidetracked onto something else.
Can you tell us, you know, more about what you saw in Gaza, what the American people need to understand about the situation in Gaza?
Hell, I saw, well, actually, in Netanyahu's speech, he talks about, ah, we withdrew from Gaza, and we got nothing but rockets in return.
Yeah, you know, Scott, the one thing is my president, my former president, Jimmy Carter, said it better than me.
He said that they're living like animals there, and myself, a good friend I met there, said we're a human experiment here.
The cruelty, they're being persecuted.
The people in Gaza are persecuted.
They are blockaded from the world.
All the bright minds there, all the liberal minds are being sort of suffocated.
There is no communication with the outside world.
They're being denied basic necessities.
They can't rebuild the city that was blasted to hell.
You see children who are scorched by white phosphorus who are not being treated.
It's just an inhuman situation, and Israel has created that, and I think that that is a real push that we have to have in our country that, thank God, Jimmy Carter is there, and there are several liberal congressmen who are awakening to this issue, but this is a human tragedy, and it's a political tragedy.
It's brought about because of political forces.
It's not humanitarian.
It's because of the isolation of Hamas, the isolation of an important component of Palestinian society.
I might not like them.
I might not like their methods.
They are part of Palestinian society.
We have to deal with them just as we dealt with, quote-unquote, terrorists in Iraq to try to build that government.
And so the characterization of withdrawal, Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, is really wrong.
I mean, Netanyahu is referring to the removal of the last of, basically, the last Jewish human shields protecting the Gazans.
Once they were removed, the Likudniks or the Kadima guys, same thing, basically turned it into a giant prison, right?
Well, they blockaded it, and you know, the 1967 war, how did that begin?
Egypt blockaded one port into Israel, the Straits of Tehran, and now you have every access to Gaza blockaded except for these contraband tunnels which are corrupting the society.
I mean, it's just a horrifying situation, and they're under occupation.
It's occupation.
It's essentially occupation.
When you're blockaded like this, when someone decides who is going to come in and out of your society, who is going to get out of there, who is going to get food, who is going to get books, that is an occupation, and it's occupation by a different name.
All right, everybody, that's Philip Weiss.
You can find his great blog, Mondo Weiss, at philipweiss.org.
That's one L in Philip.
Thanks very much for your time on the show.
Thanks, Scott.
I'll see you, man.
All right.