06/25/09 – Ira Chernus – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're also streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
Our first guest on the show today is Ira Chernis, he's a professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is author of Monsters to Destroy, The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you very much.
It's great to have you here.
Now here is your new piece with Tom Englehart at tomdispatch.com, not sure if this is running on antiwar.com yet, I'm sure it will be, it's really good.
It's called West Bank Settler Violence and the Path to Peace, well that's, there's always two titles out of Tom Dispatch article, aren't there, right?
Palestinian violence overstated, Jewish violence understated, time to change the story, is the title, I guess you gave it here.
And again, that's at tomdispatch.com.
And so I guess let's start where you start in this article here, with the opinion polling.
There's the same with the Israel-Palestine issue as everything else, I guess.
The dominant narrative is what it's all about.
Who tells the most compelling story about what any particular situation is about, from last night's bowling game to occupations in foreign lands.
So I guess maybe if you could sum up what you think the dominant narrative has been and how you think it's changing and then maybe how this is being reflected in these polls that you cite here.
Yes, I think for many years, certainly since 1967, since the Six-Day War, the dominant narrative here in the United States has been that Israel is a tiny little country that we should be good friends with, because they're like us, you know, they're a democracy, they're pioneers, all sorts of reasons they were our allies in the Cold War.
The dominant narrative is that they're this tiny little country struggling for survival against all these big, nasty enemy countries around them who are trying to destroy them.
The change that the polling shows is that people are beginning to be uncertain about how to view Israel.
They're not so sure that Israel's totally the good guy.
What has stayed the same, though, is the very negative view of Israel's neighbor, particularly now, of course, the Palestinians.
The polls show consistently that only 5-10% of the public wants the U.S. to be more supportive of the Palestinians, and so I think that means that people are confused now about how to view Israel.
They don't have the same sense of Israel as being virtuous, as being blameless, as being innocent, but they still see the Palestinians as these violent, nasty thugs who are out to attack Israel.
And, of course, my point is that that's a vast oversimplification.
You're talking about, you're generalizing about 5 or 6 million people who range the gamut, yes, among the Palestinians and among the Israelis.
There are some violent thugs, just as there are in my town, and I'll bet in yours.
There are, at the other end of the spectrum, people who have dedicated their whole lives to working for peace, non-violently, and there's everything in between on both sides of the spectrum.
The big difference, of course, is that Israel has state-sponsored violence, has this massive army, this massive military and occupying force, and the Palestinians have nothing even close comparable in terms of state violence.
But when it comes to the non-state violence done by civilians, by small groups, by groups not under control of any government, my point is that Israeli settlers are doing just as much violence, probably more, but certainly just as much as the Palestinian individual and small groups, and that if you want to keep score, that Americans have vastly underestimated how much violence is coming from the Israeli side.
Well, you know, it kind of reminds me of something I learned at community college psychology class, where if you flash a picture of a black guy and a white guy fighting, and the white guy has a knife, and you ask people what they see, they see the black guy holding a knife in his hand, because that's what their assumption is, or whatever.
Most Americans look back on the Indian Wars with terrible regret.
You don't have to be a bleeding heart to walk around this country and know that this used to be other people's land until they were all genocided off the face of the earth.
And even, I think, mostly even the most right-wing people kind of feel that way, that it's regretful the whole manifest destiny, and the red men are all savages and it's perfectly okay to kill them sort of philosophy that a lot of our ancestors believed in.
And yet, the same kind of dynamic is really what's at play here, right, is that, at least in the mind of Americans, is those Palestinians are brown, and so their lives are worth less automagically.
It's as simple as that.
And that stereotype of the violent, savage Indian has certainly not disappeared either.
The experiment you mentioned with the white person and the black person, I bet if they do the same experiment with a white person and a Native American, you'd get just the same mental switch among a lot of white people.
And this is a big problem, certainly, in Israel and in the U.S., where people are conflicted.
Because on the one hand, they do have this rational, logical understanding that Israel has the occupying power, that Israel has the dominant force, they've seen all the pictures of the Israeli bombs dropping on Palestinians and Israeli bulldozers knocking down Palestinian houses.
So there's kind of like a side of everybody's brain, most everybody, that knows that something's wrong with Israeli policy.
But on the other side, as you say, is that stereotype that we apply so readily.
We white people apply to people of color, we wealthy and middle-class people apply to the poor people, the stereotypes that associate the victim with violence, with being the perpetrator of violence.
And that's the story that we have to consciously change.
But I think the good news is that it's beginning to change.
You know, the breaking down...
Well, wait a minute, I want to add one thing here about the racism before we get too far into the particulars, because I have a lot of questions about the actual Israeli-Palestinian thing.
But there's a guy named Fred Reed that writes often for LewRockwell.com, and he's the author of A Brass Pole in Bangkok, Something I Aspire to Be, and Naked in Austin.
He's actually quite politically incorrect himself, a lot of times.
But he wrote an article that we featured on AntiWar.com yesterday, where he talked about as a young man growing up in Virginia, right at the time that Virginia closed their government schools, rather than allow their white kids to have to share them with blacks.
And how, I guess his parents were pretty hoity-toity, high-society type people, and he talked about how they would sit around and talk about the blacks, and how this is the most, you know, he witnessed as a kid, this most ugly thing, where these people who otherwise are his parents that he loves or whatever, basically become, you know, just have so much hate in their heart and become so evil, as they sit around and talk about how, oh, blacks are dirty, and they're stupid, and all their sexual habits are disgusting, and their music just shows what savages they are, and whatever, whatever.
And this is how people talk.
There's just the common assumption all the time that just black people are worth less, and that was kind of the premise upon which all other arguments were based, etc.
And that really is how it is in Israel.
I mean, you know, Max Blumenthal put out that video of the young, drunk Americans in Jerusalem, American Jews hanging out in Jerusalem, and they're a big part of the population there, I guess, and they just, they talk about the Israelis, like, about the Palestinians, like they're just animals.
Yeah, we don't want to fall into stereotyping whole nations or whole groups of people.
I know a guy in Virginia who, a white guy who is of the same generation as the guy you're talking about, and his parents kept him in the public schools because they knew that was the right thing to do.
I know many, many Jews who are just as appalled by that video as anybody else, and I started to say, the good news is how rapidly views are changing, and especially in the Jewish community, where people are beginning to take responsibility for the mistakes that we Jews have made.
And yes, there's plenty of racism in the Jewish community, just as there is in any other community, and it has to be condemned, of course, but you don't want to start generalizing about a whole group of people.
You want to recognize...
Well, that's my point.
I'm not saying all Jews are racist, I'm just saying there's a lot of racism within...
I mean, what are we talking about here, other than a bunch of European colonists in a brown people's country, colonializing them, occupying them in a racist fashion, just the way the British did before them?
But we're also talking about a group of European Jews who are hugely different from the British, because they were the victims of racism for many, many years.
Now, that doesn't excuse their violence at all, and their immoral policies, which I've been publicly criticizing for over 30 years, and I've taken a lot of hits for it, as you can imagine.
I was about to use a word you're not supposed to use on the radio, but I have not been treated well in the Jewish community, because I've been calling Jews on the racism, on the violence, on the immoral policies.
But I think it's very...
Right now, especially, it's really important to recognize that there's violence on both sides, that there are people pushing for peace on both sides, but the real story here is no longer who's right and who's wrong to kill the Palestine.
The story is, is the United States, is the Obama administration going to support the forces of peace, or the forces obstructing peace?
And we're beginning to see some moves in the Obama administration, very slowly, very cautiously.
They're testing the political winds.
They want to see how far American opinion is changing, especially in the Jewish community.
And I think all, as the polls go on, you're going to see it changing more and more to an even-handed approach that is going to pressure the Israelis to end the occupation, to end that brutality.
And, gradually, the racism changes.
You know, I have plenty of students come from the South, and they say, yeah, there's racism, yeah, but it's not what it was in their grandparents' day.
Right.
Yeah, well, certainly not.
I mean, you know, it's funny, now, I'm from Texas, and in fact, even when I saw that Max Blumenthal article, and the guy said, F the N-words, he was talking about Barack Obama.
But I'm so tone-deaf to racist stuff, I just assumed, I guess, that he was talking about the Arabs in Palestine, or whatever.
I didn't even understand that he was referring to the President.
All this race stuff is nonsense to me.
It took me until I was in my 20s before I figured out that, like, Mettle and Steen and Berg, that those are Jewish names, or that Murphy indicates Irish background.
I'm clueless to this stuff, because I don't care about it, I don't know why anybody should.
And in fact, I want to pick up on what you say, too, about the people who push for peace on both sides.
I don't think there'd be an anti-war movement worth shaking a stick at in this country without Jews.
I mean, the entire anti-war movement, left, right, and libertarian, is basically run by Jews, anyway.
And I want to urge your listeners, not only to be well aware that there's a big peace movement in Israel, and always has been, from the beginning of the Zionist movement, there were leaders who were saying, we have to make peace with the Arabs.
They were a minority, they weren't listened to, but they were always there.
The other thing I want to tell your listeners, because I found this just again last night, a wonderful source.
There's an organization here in the U.S. called Jewish Voice for Peace.
And if you go to their website, go to their FAQ, or kind of Primer 101 page, Jewish Voice for Peace, they've got a list of Palestinian peace groups that have been working for years and years, and get virtually no press in this country.
And I'm talking about non-violent activists in the Gandhian tradition, the tradition of Martin Luther King, who are working for peace in the West Bank, in Gaza, and so it's really important that we have to urge our elected officials, from the President, the Senators, Congressmen, to be supporting those voices for peace on both sides.
And one of the things that means is that Obama's got to start saying to the Israelis, as well as the Palestinians, stop the violence.
You know, what got me started writing this whole article that just appeared on Tom's dispatch was Obama's speech in Cairo, where he said to the Palestinians, you must stop the violence.
And I yelled at him, and I yelled out, what about the Israelis?
When is our President going to tell the Israelis to stop the violence?
We've got to take an even-handed approach, and that doesn't mean casting more blame on one side than the other, it means assessing objectively who's doing what, but telling both sides that the violence has to stop now.
Right, because up until now, the narrative, the dominant narrative, has been a ridiculous myth.
It's the furthest thing from the truth.
The poor Israelis besieged by the Palestinians, they're occupying the Palestinians.
Right, and of course, building settlements, and that's another issue that we should at least mention briefly, because the myth that the Israelis are using now is this idea of natural growth.
You've probably heard about that, right?
That we have to keep building settlements to accommodate natural growth.
Sure.
Well, of course, they don't accommodate a natural growth, say, for my nephew, a niece in Israel, who are going to have a baby, they ought to go out and buy a piece of land, and pay for a new house, because their family's growing.
The government didn't give them the money to do that, because they're not in the West Bank, they're in Israel proper.
Yeah, their government's going to give them my money to do that.
That's right, and of course, when Palestinians' families expand, if they want to build a new house, they've got to go through this incredible tangle of red tape with the Israeli occupation authorities, probably get denied, and if they go ahead and build the house anyway, because they need the room for natural growth, there's a fair chance a bulldozer's going to come down and knock it down.
So this story about how there's some moral obligation to keep expanding settlements for natural growth, that's another myth that needs to be quashed.
Fortunately, we have an administration now that has the backbone to stand up at least to that one, and I think that's a real positive start, and needs to be supported.
You know, if the dominant narrative is basically this mythical thing, I wonder if I should just give you a chance to try to describe your best understanding of what it's like to be a Palestinian living in the West Bank, or living in Gaza.
What are the conditions?
Because I guess, I mean, we can safely assume, I think, that Americans don't really know about the wall, they don't really know about the checkpoints, they don't really know about you know, bulldozers coming and leveling people's orchards, they don't know about the blockade on the Gaza Strip, where even humanitarian, you know, medical supplies are blocked by Israeli protesters and stuff like happened earlier this week.
Go ahead and give us a new narrative.
What is going on over there?
Yeah, again, I have all of a sudden in the past year or so become a kind of messenger of good news, particularly in the American Jewish community, the good news of more and more American Jews going into the West Bank, and even a few going into Gaza, and seeing for themselves what's going on, the way in which people simply can't live normal lives.
I've got a friend here who's an emergency room doctor, he went over to the West Bank a couple of years back to teach new techniques to the emergency room doctors over in the West Bank.
So my friend, with a Red Cross and American medical team, he was able to get from one city to another, just a few miles, in a couple of hours, because they gave him special treatment.
Palestinians, to go those few miles, had to wait five or six hours, and a lot of them never get through.
So when people have medical emergencies, or when people just want to conduct normal business, normal daily life, go from one town to another, it's really a nightmare.
And one more story.
A Jewish fellow doing wonderful work, an Israeli Jew who's now living in New Mexico, doing wonderful work for the peace movement, telling a class here at my university, Colorado, what it's like to be an 18-year-old kid.
This is his own story.
Drafted into the army, sent to the West Bank to man one of those checkpoints.
He says he started out really wanting to be nice to the Palestinians.
He says, you know, the first hour or so you're on duty in the morning, it's cool, you've just started, you're pleasant, you're polite.
Four or five hours later, you're getting hot, you're getting tired, you start getting grumpy.
Seven or eight hours later, you get absolutely nasty.
Anybody gives you any guff, you smack them with a rifle.
And this happened to this kid, who's a genuinely decent, moral guy.
And so again, I say, this is not in any way to excuse the Israelis, but it's to say that in any sort of system of oppression, the oppressed suffer worse, but the oppressors are suffering as well.
And that's what American Jews are seeing when they go to the West Bank, that everybody suffers.
And American Jews who see this are coming back with their minds totally changed.
And they're saying, I was fed this narrative of Israeli innocence, and that the Israelis are the victims, I believed it all my life, until I went and saw for myself.
And as more and more of these Jews are seeing this, they're coming back, and the American Jewish community is changing rapidly.
And that's one of the things that's allowing the Obama administration to take even the beginnings of a strong stand against the Israelis, is that the political mood here is beginning to change.
But it really depends upon both Jews and non-Jews here in the U.S., and I know for a lot of non-Jews, it's uncomfortable to talk about this situation, because you're afraid that you'd be called an anti-Semite, you're afraid that your Jewish friends will get angry at you.
Yeah, those things might happen.
But that's a small price to pay, when you consider the suffering that Palestinians go through every day, and the fact that we here in the U.S. have a huge role in changing that.
That the more we speak out, the more we write the letters to the editor, write the letters to our congresspeople, and just talk to our friends, our neighbors, and speak up for peace and justice, the more the political mood changes in the U.S., as it's starting to now, the more the Obama administration will feel empowered to put pressure on the Israelis, to tell them to quit the stalling, quit the excuses like natural growth for the settlement, and really sit down and talk about peace.
Because, you know, anybody who's reasonable and thoughtful knows how this thing's going to end.
The actual lines of a reasonable settlement have been known for years and years.
They were drawn up at Geneva by Israeli and Palestinian political figures back in 2003 in the Geneva Convention there, the Geneva Accord, and so it's not as though it's any rocket science to figure out what a reasonable settlement looks like.
It's just the American people creating the political will to pressure our government to be an even-handed broker and make it happen.
Well, you know, as you say, it really is, I think, probably to a great degree because people who aren't Jews, as you say, are so reluctant to be accused of being an anti-Semite.
There are a lot of people who just don't want to take part in the debate at all, and as you say there, and this is something Philip Weiss was talking about on the show, that there are leaders of, you know, I don't know, to me it sounds like a myth, I've never heard of such a thing, but, you know, the Jewish community, like the black community, to me it just sounds like make-believe stuff, you know, one group of a few people trying to speak for everybody else who happens to look like them, or believe like them, or whatever.
There are some strong old Jewish organizations, and those leaders tend to support the Israeli government line, the Netanyahu line, as soon as they no longer speak for the Jews of America.
It's also important, though, to say that every American citizen has a stake in this for two big reasons, at least, beyond the simple morality of it.
Practically, in the first place, the longer that conflict continues, the longer there's anti-American sentiment among Arabs, among Muslims all over the world, really, with good reason, because we've sided with Israel for so long, it makes our own diplomatic and national security issues much harder.
The other thing, more importantly, is where our tax dollars go, right?
That Congress recently authorized, over the next ten years, something like $28 billion in our tax dollars for military aid to Israel.
So we're paying for this stuff, and so we've got every right.
If you're a taxpayer in America, you've got every right to speak up, get involved in this debate, and yes, there's a risk, there's always a risk, when you speak up, people will get angry at you and call you bad names.
They've been doing it to me for 30-some odd years, as I said.
You get used to it after a while.
Well, and you know, the thing is, too, I wonder whether, you know, I mean, obviously some of that is based on legitimate paranoia, and some of it is based on, you know, it's just the most, it's the easiest dishonest smear if you don't want to have a debate with someone.
But I wonder, like, for those who are honestly that paranoid, that anybody who talks bad about Israel is actually some kind of anti-Semite, I wonder if the truth that America is really not a very anti-Semitic country, and never really has been, and, you know, there's never been, you know, Russia-style pogroms against American Jews ever in this country, there's really not a bunch of anti-Semitism.
Really, if the average Tom, Dick, or Harry brings up Israel, it's, you know, far more likely that he just wants to talk about Israel, and that there's no racist motivation behind it at all.
Do you think that the paranoia about that kind of thing is wearing off, so that more people feel like they can take part in this debate and not be so intimidated?
I do.
Now, it's a slow process, it's a difficult process, but as I say, the way it changes is by people having the courage, taking the risk to speak their mind in public, to say what they know is true.
I talk to church audiences sometimes, and I say, look into your own heart, and if you know yourself that you're not motivated by anti-Semitism, that you're motivated by a genuine moral concern for the sufferings of the Palestinian people, for the oppression that's going on, and you want to speak out against that, not only is it your right, but you're doing a real service to your fellow citizens by giving them an example of somebody who has the courage to speak out.
And sure, they're always going to throw that anti-Semitism charge around as an excuse, but I do think it's beginning to wear thin, and I think that unfortunately, the Israelis' intransigence and their continued occupation policies is creating more and more justified anger, so that when I say we need a narrative that there's peace and violence on both sides, I know a lot of people say, no, they want a narrative that Israel's the bad guy and Palestine is the good guy, and in some ways that's true.
But our government has to go into the negotiation process to help the two sides get to peace.
We've got to go with an even-handed narrative.
We've got to go with a narrative, it's kind of a truth and reconciliation process that says whatever happened in the past was terrible, but it was in the past, let's go forward with a vision of cooperation, of reconciliation, of compromise, and that's the narrative I think that we really need now.
Well, I really agree with you that the public debate seems to be opening up on this topic more and more, as the poll that you refer to in your article demonstrates, and that kind of thing, but in the reality on the ground, we're still a million miles from there, aren't we?
I mean, we've got Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman running that government over there.
There are settlements and walls crisscrossing all through the West Bank, making any kind of contiguous territory there basically impossible.
Those things are true, and I may be overly optimistic, but if you look for change, you can see it.
In the last two days, we've seen significant changes in the Israeli occupation policy.
This is reported in Haaretz, the top Israeli newspaper, that they're going to stop sending as many patrols into the major West Bank cities, that they're going to cut back on, or they're talking about a temporary halt in the expansion of settlements.
Now, for a Palestinian who's suffering in the occupation, those are small things.
They won't make a difference in day-to-day life.
But in terms of the signal that it sends to the world, the signal is that the United States calls the shots, that the Obama administration calls the shots, and that the Israelis have to back off.
Most importantly, Netanyahu's public acceptance of a two-state solution.
That was not easy for him.
It came from, because of pressure from the U.S., and that's why I keep coming back to the importance of what the average citizen can do in building up the new narrative of an even-handed approach that's genuinely about supporting the forces of peace on both sides.
Everybody, that was Ira Chernis, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and author of Monsters to Destroy, The Neoconservative War on Terrorism.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
Nice to talk to you.
Thanks a lot.
All right, and again, the article is at tomdispatch.com, Palestinian violence overstated, Jewish violence understated.
It's at tomdispatch.com.
All right.
Chaos Radio, 95.9.
We'll be right back.