Alright kiddos, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos Radio, 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And our next guest today is the author of Engaging the Muslim World.
He's a professor of history at the University of Michigan and he keeps the great blog Informed Comment at JuanCole.com.
Well that's who it is, Juan Cole.
Welcome back to the show.
Juan, how are you doing?
Great.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I'm really happy you could join us today, appreciate it.
Listen, you've got a bunch of great stuff on all kinds of important issues all over your blog, but the thing that I don't cover nearly enough on this show that I know you know a lot about is Palestine.
And if we leave it to TV news, Dr. Cole, we'll just never know a thing about what's going on over there.
And so I was hoping that I could bring you on to give my audience an opportunity to understand what is Gaza and the West Bank, who occupies it, how are things for the people there, what's going on with these protests in Egypt, and just kind of fill us in on what is the deal with Israel and Palestine in the broad sense, and then I'll try to come up with great follow-ups and we can get into some detail here.
Yes, well, as the British Empire was coming to an end in the late 40s, there was the question of what would happen in the British mandate of Palestine, which had been awarded to the British Empire by the League of Nations as part of the Versailles Settlement in World War I.
And Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and Israel, those modern countries, had all been part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled from Istanbul by Turkish speakers, which was defeated and broken up during World War I.
So the British had this strip of land called the Mandate of Palestine, and they announced that not only would they rule it for the benefit, they said, of the Palestinian people, but they also invited the international Jewish community to come and establish a homeland there, though they promised that this homeland would not inconvenience the native Palestinians in any way.
Of course, the whole thing was ridiculous, and especially with the rise of the Nazis, Palestine was one of the few places that Jews could escape to.
So you had several hundred thousand of them there by the early 40s, and when the British announced that they were departing in 1947-48, it sparked a civil war between the, say, 500,000 or so Jews who had come in under British auspices, and the over a million Palestinians who were there.
And the Jews won the civil war.
I actually, well, I don't think this, and it sounds silly, actually, to even say this now, but, well, a congressional candidate actually said this with a straight face to me the other day.
There was nobody there.
It was an empty land, you know, a land without people for a people without land.
Yes, this was a Zionist slogan, Zionism being a form of Jewish nationalism dedicated to settling Palestine.
This was a Jewish, a Zionist slogan of the early 20th century, which was completely untrue.
Palestine, in fact, was very densely populated and was, from about 1850 forward, undergoing a big population boom so that it was becoming more densely populated all the time.
So in the civil war of 48, about 700,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed by the Zionist settlers from what is now Israel.
And what we call the West Bank of Gaza were parts of the British Mandate of Palestine, which were not conquered by the Zionist settlers.
Gaza fell under Egyptian influence, and the West Bank went to Jordan.
But the Palestinians who lived there, for the most part, continued to have a Palestinian identity and to hope for a Palestinian state.
In 1967, Israel defeated Egypt and Jordan in the Six-Day War and occupied Gaza and the West Bank, and then started settling them, which is illegal in international law.
You're not allowed to settle occupied territories or to change the life ways of the people that are occupied.
And Gaza, in particular, is very, very densely populated.
There's about a million and a half people that live in a very small space.
And Gaza is a great tragedy because it got cut off from its traditional markets.
It grew oranges and foodstuffs and would trade those and handicrafts over to Jordan and Syria.
And now Israel was in the way, was blocking that.
And the Sinai Desert on the Egyptian side is pretty forbidding.
So Gaza got isolated, and the Israelis decided to stop trying to colonize it.
Under Sharon, in 2005, they withdrew their troops and their settlers, about 8,000 of them.
But then they just left Gaza surrounded, and it came under the rule of Hamas, which is a fundamentalist Muslim party, although Palestinians traditionally have been very secular.
They've become more desperate, and they have turned to religion.
And Israel doesn't like Hamas, Hamas doesn't like Israel, they've attacked each other.
And Israel's response now has been to blockade Gaza, essentially to engage in a form of widespread collective punishment, so that they're just not letting enough services, fuel, even foodstuffs, in to the people to punish them for Hamas coming to power there.
Well, you know, even Eric Gere said, and there's kind of a complicated mystery about how Hamas came to power, and I'd like to talk a little bit about that.
I guess it was in 2006 or something.
I was going to say about Ariel Sharon's, quote-unquote, unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, I remember talking on the phone with my boss Eric Gere at Antiwar.com then, and he said that, look, the Israeli Jewish settlers in Gaza are de facto human shields, and once they're removed from there, there's a reason why Ariel Sharon is taking them out of there unilaterally, not as part of some kind of deal that he made with the Palestinians, it's because they're going to turn it into the prison by the sea, like escape from New York, and that's exactly what has happened.
I mean, he said so that day.
Yes, there was a Vatican official who referred to Gaza now as a kind of concentration camp, and this provoked a great deal of outcry in Israel, because of course the Jews suffered in Nazi concentration camps.
The official clarified that he didn't say it was a death camp, he said it was a concentration camp.
But it is a kind of big prison, you can't get in and out of it very easily.
The Israelis bombed the only airport and destroyed it, they destroyed the harbor, won't let Gaza ship things in and out.
Even the little fishermen and rowboats off the shore are restricted to what waters they can fish.
The Israelis won't let ships come in and out.
So the poor people in Gaza are in a big prison, and they're being, frankly, starved.
About 10% of Palestinian children now in Gaza are malnourished, and there's evidence now of stunting of the people just not achieving their proper height because of malnutrition.
It is unacceptable, it is a profound violation of international law.
Collective punishment is not allowed in international law.
Now the thing is here too, and I don't know if you can comment on where Hamas came from in the first place.
I've read Richard Sale at UPI and others who said that the Israeli Mossad deliberately created Hamas to be a religious alternative to those secular commie pinkos in the PLO, and that guy Yassine, the old man in the wheelchair that they killed with a missile a few years back, that they worked with him in setting the thing up in the first place.
Well, yes, it is true that the Palestinians, after they were made refugees by the ethnic cleansing of 1948, were educated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which set up tent schools.
Jews became the most literate and educated population in that part of the world, and sometimes are just referred to as the Arab Jews, and that they're highly intellectual and educated and so forth.
And most of them adopted a secular Arab nationalism, Arafat and the PLO were not lefties, they were just bourgeois nationalists that were shopkeepers and engineers and so forth.
But they did have a tendency to ally with left regimes and got support from the Soviet Union.
Hamas has its ultimate origins back in the 30s when the Egyptian fundamentalist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, established a branch in Gaza.
And so its roots do go back to that period and have some authenticity.
But they were always a very small minority among largely secular Palestinians.
And in the late 80s, it is alleged by Richard Thale that he's been told by Israeli and American intelligence officials that the then-Israeli government decided to attempt to divide and rule the Palestinians by giving money and logistical support to Hamas to build it up as a rival to the PLO.
And this, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, this strategy succeeded all too well, as is usual, when you bring in the cats to get rid of the rats, you may end up with a big cat problem.
Yeah, well, and so in 2006, it was Condoleezza Rice's, you know, brilliant strategy or something, I guess, to demand elections.
The American policy, at least at that point, was that the Israelis have no obligation to deal with the Palestinian Authority of Fatah and the PLO because they're not democratically elected and you don't have to deal with people who aren't democratically elected.
So they held an election and Hamas won.
And so now we have a situation, I guess, where Fatah rules the West Bank and Hamas rules Gaza.
And there was something in Vanity Fair a couple of years back about how the CIA worked with the Egyptians to funnel a bunch of weapons to Fatah and Gaza to try to beat Hamas in a civil war in Gaza.
But all it did was end up strengthening Hamas because they're the ones who ended up with all the weapons and everything.
Do you remember that?
Yes.
Yes.
Well, what happened was there had been elections for the Palestinian Authority as part of the Oslo peace process in the mid-90s, and the PLO had roundly won those elections, both the West Bank and Gaza.
And the elections were just due again, overdue, in fact, by January 2006.
So they were held, and it was expected that the PLO would win again because the Palestine Liberation Organization is very popular among the Palestinians as a kind of spearhead of their liberation movement.
But there had been a sea change, unbeknownst to the United States.
And there were also, you know, I can't go into it, but there were technicalities in the way the voting was done that favored Hamas.
So unexpectedly, Hamas won.
The Israelis had wanted the Bush administration not to allow Hamas to run on the grounds that it is a terrorist organization and can't be dealt with.
But the Bushies were very arrogant, and they felt that an election in which a major party like Hamas was excluded would be a joke.
So as part of their democratization agenda, they insisted Hamas be allowed to run, but on the theory that it wouldn't win.
Then it did win, and formed a government, and the United States and Israel both immediately cut it off.
They cut off money.
There wasn't money going to hospitals.
Then the Israelis began kidnapping the Hamas parliamentarians and cabinet ministers.
And the U.S., the CIA, conspired with Fatah to make a coup, with the PLO to make a coup, which they did in the West Bank.
But the coup, although it succeeded in the West Bank, it didn't succeed in Gaza.
So it ended up with the PLO in charge of the West Bank, and Hamas, which was the legitimately elected government, in charge of Gaza.
And Hamas, having come to power in Gaza, did engage in sending some rockets over onto the neighboring Israeli city of Sderot, which annoyed the Israelis.
Ultimately a truce was struck in 2008, which held for the most part, until the Israelis mounted a raid into Gaza, which violated the truce terms in November of 2008.
And thereafter, the Israelis used the pretext of the earlier rocket attacks, which, and there hadn't been any significant ones in the months before the war, to launch this war on Gaza, which was a war on Gaza's infrastructure.
It destroyed schools, buildings, hospitals, markets.
It wasn't just a war on Hamas.
Well, that's such an important point about who broke the ceasefire in the run-up to that thing.
But I just got to Los Angeles right about one year ago, and one of the things was, when I got to my new place, they already had the awesome digital package on the cable there, all three C-spans and CNN International.
And the first thing I saw when I turned on CNN International was a white phosphorus bomb being exploded over Gaza, right there on live worldwide TV.
And I was in the news the other day, it's been in the news the past couple of weeks, I guess, that the Israelis, Americans have probably never heard of this, but in the old world there's this theory called the rule of law, where it sort of means, by implication there, there are no exceptions.
It's the law, even the king is not allowed to murder people kind of thing.
And so the Israelis can't go to England.
They're scared to go to England, because they're scared that they'll be put in the dock for war crimes, for waging war against, as you just said, civilians and their civilian infrastructure.
Yes, well the Goldstone report that was done for the United Nations does present substantial evidence of Israeli war crimes.
Of course, Hamas committed war crimes as well.
But not all Israelis, but those Israeli officials who were intimately associated with the war.
Oh, right, I'm sorry, yes, I meant to say that, I'm sorry, thank you for being more specific there.
I didn't mean to say, you know, anyone from Israel.
A handful of generals and politicians who were responsible for decision making of, apparently, I mean, what it looks like, and these things are hard to tell in a fog of war, but apparently of targeting civilians.
They have a warrant out against them in the UK, and so declined to go to London.
The British government pledges to change the law in Parliament, so as to prevent judges from claiming universal jurisdiction.
And you know, well, it's not really worse than what America did in Fallujah, except that in Fallujah, at least, they said, you have a chance to run first.
You know, here, everybody's locked in.
That's right.
In Fallujah, it was very clear a campaign was coming, and the U.S. military did allow most people to leave, although I believe it did prevent some people, sort of a military age, 18, 19-year-olds, from leaving.
But there was...
Yeah, that example.
That was pretty much the worst of America's operations in Iraq there, to use as the benchmark.
I mean, Fallujah was a kind of atrocity, but yes, it is true that the Gazans had no place to go.
They were trapped there while they were being bombed and attacked by the Israelis.
The Gazans were civilians, people who had nothing to do with Hamas.
I mean, it should be remembered, half of Gazans are children.
And so when you launch a total war on Gaza, you are launching a total war on civilian children.
But it goes beyond that.
The Israelis, if they suspected that there was one Hamas fighter in a clinic, they'd bomb the clinic, and they would know that there were also civilians there.
And whenever they told the U.N. that they had to bomb the clinic to get at this one Hamas fighter who was in it, they said, well, if you thought there were civilians there, you shouldn't have done that, and it is illegal.
So after the war was over, it was clear that the Israelis, I think, hoped that this war would allow them to destroy Hamas, and maybe somebody else would come to power in its aftermath.
But in fact, it made Hamas more popular, not only in Gaza, but now in the West Bank, because they looked like they stood up to the Israelis.
And the Palestinians have this principle of steadfastness, or sumud.
They know they're weak.
They know they have no chance of standing up to the Israelis, who are the best armed people in the Middle East, highly technically advanced, a bigger population than the little Gaza with one and a half million.
So they know that they can be squashed like bugs.
And their ethos is just to stand against it.
They say they can take whatever the Israelis can dish out.
And people who show that kind of steadfastness get enormously popular, which is what happened with Hamas.
So in the aftermath of the war, which was inconclusive, it didn't dislodge Hamas, the Israelis continued to pursue their blockade of Gaza and their collective punishment of the whole people of Gaza.
All right, now, here's the thing.
It's been a tradition among American presidents to put off even pretending to deal with this issue until their last year in office and then doing nothing.
But this guy, Barack Obama, came to office and the first thing he did was put peace in Palestine on the table.
The headline yesterday said, George Mitchell says it's going to be done in two years.
Is there actually hope for this?
Is Obama willing to give up a shot at a second term in order to really get this thing done, do you think?
Well, you know, things are unpredictable in politics, so you never want to say never.
I mean, the conjuncture doesn't look very promising.
The government that was elected last February in Israel is the most right-wing in the country's history.
Bibi Netanyahu, the current prime minister, actively campaigned to undermine the Oslo and Madrid processes in the 1990s, which traded land for peace.
And his coalition partners include Shas and Yisrael Betanu, which are pretty devoted to settling the West Bank, at least.
So, you know, if Netanyahu now, he's announced a settlement freeze in parts of the West Bank for eight months, his foreign minister's getting death threats from the settlers, and the move isn't popular among his coalition partners.
That's probably about as far as he can go.
I don't think he really wants the kind of two-state solution that Barack Obama and his advisors are hoping for.
And then the Palestinians continue to be divided.
Occasionally, they kill each other over whether they're PLO or Hamas.
Hamas won't have anything to do, I think, with this peace process.
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestine Authority, you know, has actually passed his constitutional limit as president and sort of is just there by fiat.
Has the administration said anything about the siege of Gaza, and maybe, you know, letting medical supplies in?
No.
They haven't said a word?
No.
No, the United States and all of its allies are complicit in this war crime.
The people of Gaza are being collectively punished.
It is illegal in international law, and the United States, Israel, Egypt, and most of NATO are complicit in this.
And this is why George Galloway, Code Pink, a number of other groups, got up two aid convoys to Gaza, one trying to come in through Jordan and the other from Cairo, just to bring, you know, food and basic supplies into people.
And the Code Pink people were allowed, in fact, about 100 of them were allowed to go to Gaza and to bring in the supplies.
The group that tried to come in through Jordan was forbidden, was made to go all the way back through Syria and Turkey across the Mediterranean land at the Egyptian port of El Arish, and was told that maybe they might be able to go on to Gaza from there.
But I don't know exactly how it happened, but they came into conflict with the Egyptian secret police yesterday, and some of them were beaten up.
And I don't know whether they tried to stage a demonstration.
Egypt doesn't allow demonstrations.
It is a dictatorship, and no more than six people may gather without government permission.
So having a lot of Western lefty anarchists in the streets of El Arish is not something that that regime is going to put up with.
So the whole thing has been a fiasco, and of course has given Egypt a black eye in the Arab world, because it looks like they're hand in hand with the United States and Israel in this collective punishment of Gaza children.
Well, what about the European governments?
Is there any pressure from them to lift this blockade, even for a little while, or anything?
I'm not aware of any significant such pressure.
I'm sure behind the scenes they read the riot act of the Israelis all the time, the Europeans.
But Europe, we have to remember that Europe was defeated in World War II, and it took itself out of geopolitics for the most part.
The French and British empires in the Middle East and at the end of the United States moved in to some extent to the Soviet Union and now Russia, and they just don't get out ahead of Washington.
They are subordinate in these issues to the United States.
And you saw how Blair went along with this war on Iraq, and even the rest of Europe didn't do anything to obstruct it.
So unless Europe finds more self-confidence as a player in international affairs, I don't see them being a factor here.
So there was this book that came out called, and I forget the name of it now, but it was a whole book, a massive study by the Gallup organization a couple of years ago, which said that really across the Muslim world they really do just hate our foreign policy.
They don't hate America, they don't hate the West, they don't want to have a clash of civilizations with the West.
And yet, I guess from the point of view of say the average half-educated person in the Middle East, Osama Bin Laden's declaration that the Americans are obviously at war with Islam itself has got to be ringing more and more true.
And I wonder whether you think we're really on the path, especially with Obama now escalating into Yemen, threats of invading Sunni Arab Northern Africa in Sudan, perhaps bombing Iran over a nuclear weapons program that doesn't exist.
Are we really in danger of a kind of full-scale clash of civilizations with Islam?
And how unnecessary really is that?
I know you think that we don't need one, but I mean how stupid is this?
That we're on this, it seems like we're on a path toward total war here.
Well, I mean, to tell you the truth, Scott, I think it's much more complicated than that.
I think that there are some positive developments.
Obama is enormously popular in the Middle East.
Saudis give him a 79% approval rating, which I think is more than even at his height in the United States.
They like that he's pressuring the Israelis to negotiate a two-state solution.
They want more evidence of progress on that than there has been, but the Egyptians praised Obama and also Netanyahu for this announcement of an eight-month freeze on his settlements in the West Bank.
Obama is ahead of schedule in getting out of Iraq.
The U.S. military presence in Iraq was a big sticking point for the Arab world, and that the U.S. seems actually to be leaving is reducing a lot of tensions and improving the image of the U.S.
So it's not all gloom and doom.
I think, as you say, most people in the Muslim world admire the American Constitution, the American system of government.
They wish they had more rule of law, they wish they had more democracy, they wish they had more freedom of the press, and that's a source of soft power.
They also like American popular culture.
There's something called the Mecca Mall in Amman and Jordan, and I went out there wondering what a Mecca Mall might look like.
I thought maybe they sell burkas and veils, but no, it's like Nordstrom's.
It's all the high-end American department stores.
So American consumerism has a lot of appeal in the region.
But there are, as you say, some policy differences that just make people's blood boil about the United States.
Palestine is a big one, Iraq was a big one.
I think we have to give Obama credit for really making significant changes in U.S. policy in a direction that should be greeted with some approval in the region.
As for Al-Qaeda, after 9-11, people were confused that bin Laden had been a war hero, he'd fought in Afghanistan against the godless communists.
So a lot of people were suspicious of the U.S. blaming him for 9-11, and they didn't want to credit him.
But over time, as Al-Qaeda has revealed its true nature in places like Saudi Arabia, done terrorism against Arabs, and especially with the atrocities in Iraq, its name has become mud.
I mean, its approval ratings have gone way down.
And so, you know, that the United States is now saying it wants to give help to Yemen to fight Al-Qaeda in the Mara province, I don't think is going to make very many people angry.
Well, I mean, obviously I don't know nearly as much about it as you do, but I'm just looking at a map, and it seems like Yemen is right there near Mecca, and that this is the whole thing that got us in trouble, whether people like Osama bin Laden or not, or his particular agenda.
It seems like his arguments have got to be ringing true to people when we're talking about Americans, at least JSOC guys, on the ground within a couple of hundred miles from the two holy places.
Well, certainly U.S. military presence in an Arab country is always going to be controversial, you're right about that.
But it should be remembered that King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia is afraid of Al-Qaeda in Yemen, and is also afraid of the Houthi rebellion among the Shiites of Yemen, and indeed the Saudis have bombed Yemen.
So the king of Saudi Arabia is going to come out and say, we're very happy for the Obama administration's cooperation in defeating terrorism in the Arabian Peninsula, and that counts for a lot.
So this is a different situation than under the Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq.
That was genuinely unpopular and it provoked a lot of terrorism.
I think myself, Al-Qaeda would be dead if Bush had invaded Iraq.
But things have changed so that American security cooperation, as long as there aren't boots on the ground, in fighting local terrorist groups, is welcomed by a lot of people in the region, in polling, that's what they say at least.
And you can see this in Pakistan too, where people have swung around against the Taliban and are very happy that the Pakistani military is not taking them on.
All right, well, I could sit here and interview you about every region in the world for hours and hours, but I guess I better let you go.
I hope we can do this again.
I apologize for having Angela pester you all the time, but I really value your opinion on the show.
No, no, you shouldn't think about it like that at all.
I'm always glad to be on.
Actually, I've got some back problems this semester and had to take medical leave.
Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
So I'm kind of laid up.
And the good thing about that for radio is that I'm just in here.
Oh, great.
So you'll be available to teach us things all season long here.
The rest of the semester.
Great.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, Juan.
I really appreciate it.
Take care.
Everybody, that's Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan, keeper of informed comment at JuanCole.com and author of Engaging the Muslim World.
