07/09/14 – Diana Buttu – The Scott Horton Show

Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
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U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
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It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest on the show today is Diana Butu.
And she is from imeu.org.
That's the Institute for Middle East Understanding.
She's a lawyer and analyst there.
Hi, welcome to the show.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Thank you very much for joining us today.
So I guess my first question for you would be in regards to the media coverage.
You've been on CNN lately, and I didn't see it, but I have it on good authority that they let you talk for 15 minutes or something and really explain what's going on over there in Israel and Palestine from a Palestinian point of view.
And I was thinking that that's unique in the history of the world.
And I wonder, I guess, first of all, whether you think that's significant, whether that signifies some kind of real change in American media coverage of the issue.
And then if so, why?
Well, actually, I have to disagree that CNN gave me some time to make the case.
It's always actually quite the opposite.
CNN seems to give an incredible amount of time to hearing Israel's version and Israel's lies when it comes to what's going on, what it is doing to Palestine, to the Palestinians.
And as a Palestinian, it's always an uphill battle to even get your voice heard on mainstream media.
The main problem, once it is on mainstream media, is that it then turns into a long debate about who is right and who is wrong.
And it's as though the two sides are somehow equal.
Whereas if you actually understand what's going on in Palestine, you will understand that this is the equivalent of the South African struggle.
There are people who are fighting against apartheid, the Palestinians, and people who are intent on making sure that that apartheid remains in place, the Israelis.
And to somehow equate as though they have some type of moral equivalence is incorrect.
And also, this is one of the battles that we end up fighting all the time on mainstream media is that they kind of make it out to be the same when there really isn't a parity between the two sides.
Right.
Well, yeah, I mean, there's no doubt that you're starting out in a situation where they've never told the Palestinian side of the story at all.
So if they're if they do give you a few minutes, I mean, that is like a, you know, daybreak or, you know, the sun coming out after the rain or something like that, even if they give you just a minute.
I guess the way it was described to me was they were sort of going through the Israeli narrative and letting you respond to it, at least in a fashion that the person, my friend and boss, who was I was talking about with this, he had never seen that much openness for discussion on CNN ever.
I guess one time the Queen of Jordan and Pat Buchanan were allowed to explain the Palestinian point of view on MSNBC for about 10 minutes, six years ago, something like that.
But otherwise, we just don't see this at all.
Right.
This is a major problem, particularly given the fact that the United States is such a player in in this issue and the fact that the United States continues to give Israel over $3 billion in U.S. taxpayer money every year.
You one would expect that given this this relationship and this link that you would at the very least hear where U.S. taxpayer dollars are going and how they're being spent to to drop bombs on children, quite frankly.
But instead, this is an issue that doesn't seem to be covered in in in mainstream media unless there are Israelis who who end up losing their lives.
Right.
Well, you know, in the Jake Tapper interview the other day where he was talking with some Israeli spokesman, I guess, and was saying, well, you know, this beating of this young Palestinian American, which we have on video, and he's an American, so we're covering it.
We're hearing from the human rights groups that this is how you treat Palestinians all the time.
What about that?
And he says, no, no, there's the rule of law.
We're like the West with the rule of law, like you guys and all this stuff, which I'm not really bragging about the rule of law in America or anything, but I just thought it was kind of silly.
And I think this goes to show exactly why they don't really cover this is because if they tell the truth about it at all, or I guess if they have to even confront the real challenges to their claims at all, they obviously fall apart.
Who thinks that the average Joe on the West Bank has any accountability whatsoever when it comes to being mistreated by the Shin Bet or the IDF ever, or whatever happens to their property, to their families?
There's no accountability.
They're under occupation.
Everybody knows that.
There's nothing like the rule of law.
There's a rule of law like there was a rule of law for the average citizen of Baghdad circa 2006.
Yes, and I think it's actually even a little bit deeper than that.
We're in the West Bank talking about a system of military law.
So given that it's military law, it's not going under a regular court system.
And what this means is that people can be held without charge, without trial, in secret evidence for six months, and that that detention can be renewed.
There are people who are still remaining in administrative detention eight years after the fact that they still have no charges even filed against them.
When it comes to the issue of this 15-year-old boy, American boy, who was beaten, his story is the story of many other Palestinian children.
Right now there are 200 Palestinian children who are languishing in Israeli prisons, many of them also being held without charge, without trial.
There is a long line of cases dealing with children who are tortured by the Israeli security system.
And even not just, it's not just a question of the army carrying out these acts, but also the Israeli settler population has similarly done things and carried out acts with impunity.
90% of the cases that are are 90% of the cases that are filed with the police against Israeli settler activity end up going without even a simple indictment.
And those that are indicted, very few of them actually end up resulting in a conviction.
And many cases, those convictions are often lead to very light sentences.
So this is the type of system or the quote unquote rule of law that Mr. Regev is talking about.
There's one set of laws for Israelis and another set of military laws that are applicable for Palestinians.
It's a joke for anybody to think that this is the equivalent of any democratic system around the world.
All right.
Now, one thing is that the kind of unthinkable seems to regular people to be impossible, usually.
Come on, who tortures children as a matter of state policy?
And I already know you're right about this because I've read about this before, but I'd like to give you a chance to, you know, cite some sources or tell us how, tell the audience how they can find the proof for themselves that that really is true, that the Shin Bet tortures Palestinian children.
Absolutely.
There are many, many reports that you can be turning to.
There's organizations, such international organizations like the Defense for Children International, which has an office based in Palestine, and they document these issues.
You can also check out the Damir, which is a Palestinian prisoner rights organization, which also documents this.
The United Nations has similarly documented this.
When it comes to the issue of settler violence, the United Nations has written reports.
Israeli human rights organizations like Yesh Din and B'Tselem have also written reports.
Palestinian organizations like Al-Haq have also written reports.
All of these reports fully document the situation that is taking place here.
There is no shortage of documentation.
The big problem is that as a Palestinian living under military occupation, you're always up against this very big, very strong media machine that goes out of its way to deny the human rights abuses that it is perpetrating.
It denies them not only to an international audience, but to a domestic audience.
This is why, Scott, when talking about this issue, this isn't simply confined to the attacks that Israel carries out against the West Bank, people in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.
There's an entire system of racism that pervades this area.
I'm sorry.
We're going to get right back to that all pervasive system, the totalitarianism of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip siege and all of that right after this break.
It's Diana Butu from the IMEU.org, IMEU.org.
It's just $25 per year for the back pocket size print edition, 15 per year to read it online.
That's the future of freedom at FFF.org slash subscribe.
Peace and freedom.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Diana Butu from the Institute for Middle East Understanding.
That's IMEU.org, the Institute for Middle East Understanding.
And I'm sorry about the hard breaks programmed in here.
No way around it.
Got to take them.
But when we were interrupted, you were saying that it's not just that there's an occupation in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem.
It's the all pervasive system of being interrupted by commercials.
So go ahead from there, please, if you would.
Yes.
In addition to the commercials, it's the fact that Palestinians for 66 years have simply not been free.
Right now, you know, there's a pervasive system in Israel itself in which Palestinians are deemed to be legitimate targets.
Everybody from the prime minister, the Israeli prime minister, has called for bloodletting and for revenge.
The foreign minister, who supposedly represents all of the citizens of this country, has called Palestinians who were citizens of Israel a fifth column and has called for their expulsion, their ethnic cleansing from from the country.
And so living in this in this climate, unsurprising that that there is so much violence that is perpetrated against Palestinians because it is allowed to go unchecked by the by the state.
I get the idea.
I don't know how much time you spend actually in Israel, but I get the idea from, well, for Max Blumenthal's writings and I guess from some things that Phil Wise has said in that documentary movie Defamation.
It sort of seems like it's always America 2002 in Israel.
It's always the terrorists, the orange alert, the terrorists coming to get us.
And it really is, you know, in majority, I guess, a society where people are convinced that the Palestinians are the aggressors and they don't ask the question who's occupying whom.
They're just looking at terrible Arab Muslims keep attacking us, who can keep them at bay.
And they really believe that crap like Americans in 2002.
Yes, I mean, I am a citizen of Israel.
I'm a Palestinian, but I have Israeli citizenship.
And so I understand exactly what you're talking about.
It's worse than that.
It's not just a question of this constant state of of of fear that they that the Israelis are instilling in their own mindset.
It's the it goes beyond that.
It's that a Palestinians are considered to be legitimate targets and be that Palestinian rights actually don't exist.
The state goes very much out of its way to deny that Palestinians are the original inhabitants of the country.
They deny things like the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
We can't even up until certain point, we weren't even able to educate our own students about these about this issue.
And to this day, organizations that try to educate Palestinians and others about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine are ineligible to receive state funding from the state.
So it goes beyond just this conditioning of of of scare tactics towards Israelis.
But it actually goes right to the very core where Palestinians are not allowed to have their own identity.
It sounds like, I mean, mostly what I've learned my whole life about the Jim Crow South and, you know, post slavery South that well, like Jefferson put it, we have the wolf by the ears and all that.
So we got to keep them down or else they might rise up.
And so it's just then all the state sanctions, second, third, fourth class citizenship for the others among us.
That's precisely the case.
As it stands, there are about 40 laws, 40 to 50 laws officially on the books that either directly or indirectly discriminate against Palestinians who are citizens of the country.
It's everything from the inability of of Palestinians to immigrate to the country, whereas anybody who's Jewish from anywhere around the world is given unfettered access and unfettered right to to immigrate to Israel, to other things where there's discrimination and housing, open discrimination, housing, where committees can decide whether you are considered suitable or not suitable to be able to live within that community.
There's been in terms of state funding, a lot less money allocated to Palestinian schools, less money allocated to Palestinian towns and cities.
And since 1948, there hasn't even been the construction or the expansion of a single Palestinian town in in the entire country.
All of the new towns that are created are only towns designed for Jewish Israelis and nothing designed for Palestinians.
So the discrimination is pervasive.
Add to that the the statements that officials make, whether it's the prime minister or, as I said, the foreign minister who openly calls for the ethnic cleansing of the original inhabitants of the country.
You can see the environment in which we live.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's really incredible.
And again, like you said at the beginning, all with U.S. support and I forget if you framed it this way or not, but I certainly would only with U.S. support.
Otherwise, this would not continue.
It couldn't.
That's precisely the case.
It's it's U.S. financial support and it's U.S. political support.
And then the trickle down effect that ensues of European financial support and European political support.
All of this would not be possible were it not for the fact that the United States continues to maintain very close ties and continues to enable Israel's very bad behavior.
All right.
And speaking of which, can you please catch us up on all the bad news out of the West Bank and Gaza from, you know, I guess just the last four or five days, the attacks since the airstrikes on Gaza began and and the riots in the streets of Tel Aviv, everybody chanting debt to the Arabs and all that kind of madness?
Yes, we've had it's been a very difficult time for Palestinians here.
The Israeli army launched a bombing campaign against the Gaza Strip the day before yesterday.
So far, there have been 35 Palestinians killed, many of them are children.
Two whole families were completely wiped out.
The Israeli army admits that it's dropped 400 tons of bombs and over the Gaza Strip more than the entire period of their bombing campaign in 2012.
Entire homes have been flattened and it's important to keep in mind that this is an area that is completely under Israeli military control.
There's no place for people to go.
They don't have bomb shelters.
They don't have sirens.
There's no place for them to go whatsoever.
All of the land crossings, one land crossing is controlled by the Egyptians and the other land crossing is controlled by the Israelis.
There's no place for these people to go.
Eighty percent of the Gaza Strip are refugees and twenty percent of this population are under the age of three.
So we're talking about bombs that are being dropped on children's heads.
In the West Bank, there's been a system of collective punishment that's been in place now for well over three weeks with 12 Palestinians killed in the West Bank as the Israelis went around searching for three Israelis who had gone missing and were later killed, even though they knew that they had already been killed.
Five hundred Palestinians have been arrested.
Two thousand homes have been ransacked.
A few homes have been wholesale destroyed because they were considered to be suspects.
And we're seeing lynchings taking place in East Jerusalem, including a young boy who was kidnapped, tortured by being forced to drink gasoline.
And then he was set on fire, his body set on fire.
So the situation for Palestinians is quite a grave one.
And it leads me and others to ask the question, who is here protecting Palestinians?
Yeah, it's just incredible, especially the lynching and the story we talked with Max Blumenthal before about the how they knew they just lied, pretended that they were looking for these kids as they're ransacking all these West Bank homes and inciting all this hatred on the idea that they were still alive somewhere when in fact they already knew that they were dead.
It's really amazing.
Well, and so I guess let me ask you now that nobody's even pretending to state solution peace talks, peace process, Oslo, Annapolis, blah, blah, blah thing anymore.
What is the future for Palestine?
The future, I think, is that the only way to move forward is Israel has to be held to account for its international law violations and for its violations of human rights.
I think that we as citizens, global citizens, have to really be pushing for Israel's isolation around the world, whether that's in the form of boycotts or divestment or sanctions or complete isolation.
This is something that needs to happen.
I have very little faith in the United States moving, but I do have a lot of faith in the people around the world getting people to move.
And I'm hoping that we begin to see some more activity as well within the United Nations to try to condemn Israel and to completely isolate it.
If we simply allow this to continue as it as it is, then we're going to see a lot more Palestinians being killed because Israel has never been given a red light.
And as we speak, they're at least threatening a full scale invasion of the Gaza Strip, which you know, could be could very well be imminent at this point.
And on your last point there, I did see a thing on Vox.
There's the music.
I did see a thing on Vox that showed that all around the world, everyone agrees with you, except the American people who don't know the first thing about it.
So we're working on that.
But thank you very much for your time, Diane.
It's really been great.
Thank you.
All right.
But that is Diana Butu.
She's at the Institute for Middle East Understanding.
IMEU.org.
IMEU.org.
We'll be right back.
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