07/08/14 – Philip Weiss – The Scott Horton Show

Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
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All right, our first guest on the show today is our friend Philip Weiss from mondoweiss.net, mondoweiss.net, the war of ideas in the Middle East.
And he's got a great stable of writers over there besides his own self, including Alex Kane and Max Blumenthal and others.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Phil?
Great, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
My pleasure.
I was hoping you could help fill us in on all the bad news.
I guess the latest that I heard was the Israeli government called up the reserves and they were preparing to invade Gaza with a land invasion force.
Is that correct?
Has that already happened yet?
Do you know?
Well, it certainly hasn't happened yet.
There are reports that that's in the offing.
I don't know how accurate they are.
I mean, certainly Israel has launched an assault on Gaza in recent days by air.
And I guess there are reports that 10,000 to 12,000 reservists have been called up.
So and they Israeli officials have said that they might be doing this.
So but it hasn't begun yet.
And then, well, I don't know.
It would just be a punitive thing or it would be are they saying that this would be their attempt to finally go in there and destroy Hamas once and for all, like last time?
I think it's the latter.
I mean, it's just, you know, Groundhog Day in, you know, but of a genocidal or murderous version, Groundhog Day.
Yeah.
We're going to finally wipe out the sources of these rockets yet again.
And they just don't have an answer, except, you know, war after war after war, which is, I think, beginning to be more and more obvious to people in America.
Right.
Well, and the thing of it is, of course, is that these rockets, quote, unquote, they come with ironic quotes.
These are homemade devices.
I mean, they can be deadly.
Don't get me wrong, but they're not deadly very often.
They're basically even under siege.
Palestinian kids with kitchen cabinets can put together rockets like this.
They'll always will be able to.
That's true.
Although, I mean, I think that they have some fairly sophisticated devices that, you know, wherever they're coming from, have a little bit more range and greater accuracy.
But maybe they need a garage, not just a kitchen, but still.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, I think that what you're getting at is that there has to be a political solution of that.
You're not exactly because you can't smash the source of rockets when the source of rockets is your bad policy rather than a specific garage on a block somewhere.
Right.
And again, 80 percent of their population is refugees.
These people were kicked out of Israel and prevented from returning.
So what are you going to do with that type of grievance?
You can't just continue to fire missiles at them.
That is a kind of a profound foundational grievance about how you're constructing your state.
You've got to deal with that with some type of political solution.
All right.
Now, going door to door and just harassing the hell out of the people of the West Bank, pretending that they're looking for these three kidnapped and later turned up dead Israeli teenagers, all that that is just, you know, forget about there.
There's I don't know what it says in some ancient Bible or whatever, but by by no means in in modern day civilization is that acceptable whatsoever.
That kind of collective punishment, not with our modern theories.
I agree with you.
And what about Hamas?
Hamas, they're a government and they're responsible to some degree for this, that and the other thing, including perhaps people who are not members of Hamas, but are shooting rockets or maybe parts of Hamas.
I guess somebody said a Hamas break off group had been behind the kidnapping or something.
Is it ever OK to bomb Hamas?
To what degree are they responsible and to what degree is it OK to ever bomb them, Phil, do you think?
Well, I don't think it is legitimate to bomb them for the attack on the kidnapping of the the teens in the West Bank.
That was a splinter group.
It's a rogue group that doesn't approve of Hamas is more conciliatory methods.
And you know, you can't blame Hamas for that.
And Israel's efforts to blame Hamas, Israel's motivation to blame Hamas is simple.
They don't like the fact that the Palestinians have a unified government.
They want a divided population.
They want infighting among their enemies.
That is what they've always wanted.
They want infighting among Arab states.
And that's happening, obviously, not only at Israel's behest, but, you know, Israel certainly hasn't helped there.
And they want the Palestinians to be fighting among themselves when the Palestinians announce a unified government.
That's bad news for Israel.
So they're using that team, the killing, the horrifying killing of these three teams.
They're using that as a an excuse for a political operation to try to divide Hamas from the from Bafata and, you know, divide the Palestinian population in a violent manner.
Right now, I mean, it is an important bill.
How obvious that is that they're saying, oh, goody, some kids got kidnapped.
Let's lie our asses off and use it as a rice dog fire.
Whoopee, everyone.
Well, it's obvious to you and it's obvious to me.
And my question I get my answer to you is how obvious it is.
Is it to the American press generally or the American people?
I just I I'm waiting for the learning curve seems to be kind of slow here.
But nonetheless, it's happening.
And I think that we can celebrate some of the the progress that's being made.
Yeah.
Well, you know, as we've talked about before, and and I may be more cynical than you about this, Phil, but, you know, it's it's my basic belief that the or my my understanding is that the American people had no understanding of this, that, in fact, I'll give you a perfect example of what I believe is the the cookie cutter typical conception.
And that was in Rand Paul's lies in the National Review, where he pretended that the Palestinians are, quote, unquote, neighbors of the Israelis, as though they're Jordan.
They're the country next door, not the occupied territory.
And I think that that is the way that most people understand it, is that it's some kind of like World War One type fight over the line and where the line should be.
And both sides claim God gave the land to them.
So they're just going to fight forever and ever and ever and whatever.
And it takes the whole the complete the reality of the who's occupying who and all the very, you know, earthly political things going on here get completely obscured by the fantasy of the narrative and mixed with all the religiosity and the rest of that.
I think Rand Paul says, I think you're right.
But, you know, here is one, you know, I think I'm more of a libertarian in this sense that classically that in the old days, when people said the government was responsible for everybody smoking and, you know, the public health organizations were responsible, I said, well, people are choosing to smoke.
They have the information.
And, you know, I used to make that argument.
And I'm a but as a big government guy, I say, you know what, and big media, these attitudes can change when big institutions change.
And similarly, in this case, the information is out there, Americans could inform themselves about the reality that it's not neighbors, that it's not a cycle of violence, that it's an occupation.
And they just don't choose to inform themselves.
Well, actually, I blame the media.
And I blame Rand Paul less than I blame the media.
They are the people who are supposed to the lifeblood of a democracy is good information.
And we are getting bad information here.
And that is the one sort of hopeful view I have of this matter right now is that the media are changing.
I'm sorry, we're gonna I'm gonna let you elaborate on that point and others too, when we get back.
It's the great Phil Weiss, everybody from Mondoweiss.net.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show Scott Horton show.
I'm talking with Phil Weiss from Mondoweiss.net, which I hope you read all the time.
And we're talking about, uh, well, the crisis in Israel and the crisis in America over the crisis in Israel, which, uh, as Phil was emphasizing before the break is really a crisis of the media.
Uh, but then you were going to say before the break interrupted, Phil, something about, uh, the indications that you're seeing that the media finally is getting a little bit smarter about this.
Right.
Uh, I mean, I think that we just have to acknowledge that the failure of the G20 that the failure of the John Kerry peace plan, peace effort, he couldn't even get a, a GD framework out of this thing.
All he wanted was a framework that would lead the way, you know, the sort of a roadmap, not even roadmap, you know, and he, he spent nine months going back and forth and couldn't do that.
And it failed.
Okay.
And it failed in a giant way.
And, and chiefly because of Israel's rejectionism, the mainstream media have accepted the two state paradigm that they've always said, everyone knows the solution.
They've said this again and again for many years.
Well, if everyone knows the solution, then why is this a failure?
And I think that even the mainstream media, which to some degree are attached to the existence of a Jewish state, uh, in Israel have signed on to that, uh, definition and, and as sort of, uh, the world's answer to this problem, even the mainstream media is understanding this is a loser or something is just wrong with this.
And this thing just failed.
This has real consequences, uh, you know, epistemologically or whatever you're going to call it or intellectually or discursively.
And I think that for many reporters now, uh, who are not attached to Zionism particularly, and there are mainstream reporters who aren't attached to Zionism.
They're saying, what the heck is going on here?
And Israel's only answer to this is violence.
And we've, you know, there's been such a, uh, a smorgasbord of violence in the last 10 years of all varieties that I think the media are getting a little sick of it.
And I'm beginning.
So, so lately there has been much more coverage of, uh, Israeli violence in a critical fashion that's changing.
And I think that if Israel were to invade Gaza, you know, five years after, six years after it, uh, invaded Gaza the last time to stop the rockets and destroyed everything that people had, you know, these people are living under a medieval siege.
Uh, uh, the blockade there has a medieval quality.
I think the American media might really begin to change.
And that goes back to your point that Americans don't know.
They could know.
It wouldn't take long for them to know.
And I think that, um, some of this, uh, the language is changing in important ways.
Right?
Yeah.
I, I, uh, I think it's okay, especially with responsibility.
You know, we often use, uh, numbers to assign responsibility, but I'm, uh, a little more flexible than that.
I can put all the responsibility on the liars and the liars by omission in media and on the American people who are too damn lazy and uncaring to go look it up for themselves because Mondoweiss.net has been sitting there and so's antiwar.com and so's Electronic Intifada and a million other places where people can go to learn about this if they care to.
But Scott, those folks get a lot of traffic.
I mean, I mean, I'm a glass half full guy.
Let me be clear.
I'm a progressive.
So I believe in glass half full.
I think the Amer- that, that, that humanity is stepping forward every day towards a brighter future.
I'm being a little ironic there, but don't you see some progress in American understanding on this?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's there.
I mean, and again, it's just the, the very existence of the internet and the truth and the truth be told, you know, people's eyes get open.
I mean, I mean, I'm sure you've been surprised as I have by ordinary people, quote unquote, ordinary people's expressions of impatience and rage at Israel on comment boards, on bumper stickers, in public forums.
Uh, at the democratic convention, when they shoved that Jerusalem will always be undivided, you know, there was a floor demonstration.
Jeez, when was the last time there was a floor demonstration at the democratic convention?
And you know, in the, in the media, the, the changeover, I think, was kind of illustrated this week, um, on CNN, where they, they had remarked on this tweet that men in, in Israeli police uniforms, because they were Israeli police, beat the living crap out of an American citizen on the West bank as he's handcuffed and helpless on the ground.
And then all of the responses to the tweet, of course, we're mocking them for trying to pretend like it was questionable or not whether these were actually Israeli police.
But then on the other side of that, Jake Tapper, as I'm sure you've seen, uh, gave a pretty substantial grilling to, uh, one Israeli flunky, you know, functionary or another.
Yeah.
Hey man, you know, all your critics say that what you did to this American is what you do to the all Palestinians every day.
And he was like, ah, what?
Nobody ever said that to me on TV.
Isn't that great?
It's great.
Hats off to Tapper.
You know, I mean, uh, I think he knows the story.
And again, I put him in the category of a lot of journalists who've gone along with a paradigm because that's the solution that they've been given.
And now they see a lot of problems with it and they have to be responsible.
I mean, I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm not as cynical as you are.
I've got my cynicism, but I think there's a certain amount of intellectual responsibility they feel to tell people, Hey, well, this, this thing might be falling apart, you know?
Yeah.
Well, and it is, I mean, and to get back to what's mostly missing here in media that finally is starting to change in a positive way is a real crisis.
Can you tell us more about what's going on on the ground there now or in the last few weeks and leading up to today?
I think that, you know, what we've seen is a real uptick in violence in the last few weeks to the point that even Brian Williams on NBC is talking about a possible Intifada.
I mean, far be it from an American to tell Palestinians whether they're having an Intifada, but there have been, uh, there's been a lot of, uh, uh, uh, a lot more resistance on the West bank.
There have been, uh, Israeli raids across the West bank.
Hebron, the largest city has been locked down again and again.
And, uh, uh, freedom of movement has been restricted across the West bank even more than it usually is.
So I think that we're, uh, and there's a sense of panic on the part of, uh, Israeli leaders, uh, by the reunification of, uh, Fatah and Hamas, uh, the political factions of the, uh, uh, Palestinian society and, um, the, the breakdown of the two state paradigm, the increasing criticism of Israel and in, in international forums, uh, the growth of BDS, the boycott movement, all these things are making Israel a more, uh, panicked and, um, I think a violent actor.
And so I think, uh, I, I mean, there are crises there all the time.
I don't know for what, what level of, on the Richter scale we're headed for, but I think this could be a landmark year in terms of, uh, the understanding of Palestinian resistance, uh, worldwide.
And Israel would like nothing more than for that resistance to be violent because it has an answer to violent resistance.
Uh, and yet the world community has been, uh, or the, uh, a lot of progressives have increasingly been supporting this nonviolent movement of resistance, which is boycott, divestment and sanctions.
So I, the, the short answer, I'm sorry, I gave you such a long winded answer.
I think that we were headed toward a South Africa struggle for equal rights.
That's what we're beginning to see is, uh, here's this oppressed population.
They want equal rights.
What are you going to do about it?
Right.
Well, and so can you give us an update on the BDS and, and how big of a movement that is?
And can you give us any kind of ballpark and, you know, billions of dollars lost in business and how it's working?
I don't know the numbers.
I know that it's working symbolically very effectively.
I mean, the Presbyterian church, uh, while saying we have nothing to do with BDS divested from three companies that were involved in the occupation, uh, last month in a, in a landmark vote, it had repeatedly, um, shut down this, uh, divestment effort by narrow votes.
Well, this time it approved it.
And, uh, there were real shades of South Africa here.
Uh, they voted to divest from South Africa, um, 25, 30 years ago.
So I think BDS is having really big symbolic victories and, um, it's making the Israelis sweat.
Uh, I think again, the South Africa, it's the South Africa analogy that is really, uh, beginning to gain traction that, uh, yeah.
But where's the clerk in this one?
It's a good question.
I mean, there probably are a few Mandela's.
I don't know who, but I don't know who's the clerk.
I mean, the nicest, the, the, the kindest person in Israeli politics on this issue is what's her name from Kadima.
Who's horrible, right?
I agree with you, but you know that you're absolutely right.
And who has licensed this kind of right-wing extremism in the United States by saying, you're right, you're right, you're right.
Well, when that starts to change, I think we could see a clerk in a few years.
I mean, again, glass half full, but I mean, the other part of this, just by the way, is there's no green line anymore.
This whole idea of a West bank separate from Israel that's been destroyed by this crisis in the last few weeks, Israel's all over there.
It's clear.
They have complete sovereignty over these territories.
They go where they please.
And so, uh, you know, we're seeing one state, this is effectively one state with these little Bantu stones, uh, where they forced the Palestinians into.
We got to take this break.
I want to keep recording you for just a minute, but we'll be right back.
Everybody with Debra Sweet in just a minute.
Um, but if it's okay, Phil, I want to ask you a little bit more about that.
Uh, there's been talk in Israeli politics lately about going ahead and outright annexing the West bank and forget de facto, let's just go ahead and, and call it the province of Sumeria or whatever it is.
And then I guess the, it was, uh, uh, Livni, right.
Who, who threatened to walk out, is that right?
To destroy the coalition if they did it.
But I guess what you're telling me is it's only a matter of time now and not much time before it's just kind of recognized broadly that the West bank has been annexed already.
I, I think it de facto is annexed.
I mean, that we're talking about de facto one country.
I think the official, the jury recognition though, would, is not going to happen for a while, particularly because of what you, the pressures.
And I mean, what the United States would do if they did that, I think there would actually be some pressure from the United States, but, um, de facto, yeah, that's what we're dealing with.
We're dealing with one country and yeah.
In that sense, it really has been since 67, since they never meant to give up any of it.
It's always just been a ruse, this peace process, this whole time just for keeping it anyway.
So why?
It certainly, it certainly looks that way.
Yeah.
So, or, yeah, I mean, certainly in practice it's played out that way anyway, but, um, so then here's, here's my only, uh, thing about that.
Of course I would rather have a no state solution or at least the most limited state possible, you know, just your local kind of, you know, peace deputy walking around, uh, on the, on the night Watchman state that way there's very little to fight about.
And so identity politics don't have to play that much of a role because who cares who's in charge of the very, very, very limited government, that kind of thing.
But what I'm looking at in the real world I live in is that if there, if it's really a one state thing and the Palestinians are a majority, um, then, uh, and they're, you know, basically the Israelis have to decide or, you know, somehow by international pressure, they're forced to choose democracy over Jewishness of the state.
Then there'll be another massive knock, but, and they'll just massacre everybody or drive them into the Jordan river or something and make sure to keep the demographic majority even inside the new greater Israel because it, which would be, you know, an absolute, uh, you know, horrible humanitarian catastrophe.
So it was sort of just from like, and it's, I don't even have a dog in the fight, but just looking at it as an observer, it sort of seems like, you know, probably just nevermind morality, um, about what, you know, the perfect or the good or whatever, but just what's, what solution would be less likely to see the Palestinians just outright butchered by the Israelis would probably be a two state solution rather than a one state one.
I love what you're saying because there's so much overlap between you and Noam Chomsky here.
It's really funny.
I mean, Chomsky wants a no state solution and Chomsky says the existing solution, if it's a one state solution is basically ethnic cleansing and just worse than any worse than apartheid, worse than anything we've.
So that's why he's for a two state solution.
So you're sort of saying the same thing isn't partition and limited Palestinian sovereign or, you know, Palestinian sovereignty on half the land.
Isn't that better than them being ethnically clamped because the Israelis won't.
And I think, I mean, don't get me wrong.
I mean, I would have the Israeli parliament abide by a very limited rule of law and then let all the Palestinians vote for members of it.
Again, if it's that limited in its power, let everybody have a one state and equal rights and all that.
I mean, you know, it's not like I'm saying, oh, we got to appease the KKK in the South so that they don't, you know, do even worse or something like that.
You know, I'm not taking that side, but I'm just saying, realistically speaking, boy, who's going to stop the Jewish KKK from cleansing the West Bank of Palestinian Muslims and Christians?
You know, and that's where I go to my identity politics.
And I say that you're right that that has been licensed by the United States again and again, but look at the Jewish community in the United States.
I think it's changing enough that they may actually say this is crazy.
And similarly, the politicos in the United States might begin to say this is crazy.
That's why I'm glass half full that a clerk could emerge that the international pressure is transforming the politics of this.
And Israel's aggression on the West Bank is actually a symptom of the greater and greater pressure they're facing.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry I've already kept you waiting.
Thank you so much, Phil.
It's always great talking to you, Scott.
Great to talk to you, too.
That's Phil Weiss, everybody.
The great Phil Weiss from mondoweiss.net and he's been a great journalist for a great many years and for the last quite a few on Israel, Palestine, pretty much exclusively.
He's got a great stable of writers over there, Horowitz, Roth and Blumenthal and et cetera.
And we'll be right back with Deborah Sweet in just a minute.
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