07/21/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Eric Margulies.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World, an American Raj, Liberation, or Domination.
He's the author of this recent piece.
We're running it in the views at AntiWar.com today, David V. Goliath in Gaza.
Some more of this poor little Israel claptrap, huh?
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
Well, I'm watching these multiple stories with, first, the Gaza, the disaster there, the man-made disaster there, the crash in Ukraine, a very, very dismaying time.
Yeah, things are looking pretty bad here.
Well, so now, I just went over this piece of right-wing pro-Israel propaganda that was going around, and I was trying to kind of debunk it.
It was Dennis Prager kind of leaving out more than half the story and telling the story about Israel as David and all of the surrounding Arabs as Goliath, I guess in a general sense.
Can you comment about that, of just who's the underdog and who's not?
Well, I've heard this for many times, poor little Israel, facing 100 million Arabs.
The reality is that the Arab states are all incompetent messes right now.
They have almost zero military capability.
Half of them are allied with Israel secretly, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf states, Jordan.
They've long been covert Israeli allies.
So really, the Palestinians who are trying to establish their own state have almost no backers left.
They have Syria, which is in chaos and being torn apart by a U.S.-led revolution, and just in Iran, maybe Hezbollah.
And Hamas has sided with the rebels against Hezbollah and Assad up there in Lebanon, so that's it for Syrian support for them, right?
I know.
It's just, it's a very dismal situation.
It's so much for Arab brotherhood.
But the real point is that Hamas all happens to be the only, after Tunisia, the only other democratically elected government in the Arab world that's left.
And it is now being crushed by the Israelis, not so much because of firing rockets, which as I wrote, I think is very foolish, but because they want to crush any resistance to Israel's control in the area, and they want to put an end to any hope for a Palestinian state.
So, you know, I guess I've heard them say, and it's pretty clear, right, that this, I mean, they weren't even shy about it at all.
Netanyahu denounced America for recognizing the coalition Fatah-Hamas government there.
And so everybody says, yeah, this is meant to undermine that, to destroy that alliance.
And maybe it already has.
I don't know.
Maybe Hamas has withdrawn from it.
But I guess I don't really see the, you know, the one-two there, how exactly that's supposed to work.
It seems like if anything, it would just motivate the Palestinians to, in defiance, to try to keep that coalition government together.
When, you know, anybody on the West Bank, just as well as the other seven billion of us on earth, know that Hamas didn't kidnap those kids and start this whole trouble.
So why wouldn't Fatah side with Hamas rather than with what the Israelis want them to do?
Because Fatah, after the murder of Yasser Arafat, what looks like a murder anyway, Fatah has become a puppet, a sock puppet for the Americans and the Israelis.
They paid for it, they bribe all the Fatah leaders, they control its security forces, they provide it with food.
So Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader, is really a disgraceful, a quisling.
But even him, he's making little peeps of protest.
But he's viewed by most of the Palestinians as a traitor.
Well, the headline at Antiwar.com is now 556 Palestinians killed, 27 Israelis killed, and last I heard, when it was 20 of them, 18 of them were soldiers.
And you know, Eric, I want to go ahead and bring this up, because I'm sure you'll have something smart to say about it.
Two of these Israeli soldiers killed were Americans, one from California, one from Texas, over there fighting for Israel.
They've got a birthright that the Palestinian refugees of the Gaza Strip do not.
What's up with that?
Well, America has long allowed joint Israeli-American citizenship.
Before any joint citizens were allowed, the Israelis got a special dispensation.
And in fact, a lot of Israelis hold joint citizenship.
If I went and served in the Egyptian armed forces, I could lose my American citizenship.
But there's carte blanche to do whatever you want in Israel.
Israel gets away with whatever it wants in the U.S. government, because it controls Congress or at least congressional affairs on the Middle East, and this is the special exemption.
What's more important in this case is that certainly the whole Arab world and much of the rest of the world is viewing the agony of Palestine and blaming it on the United States.
They're saying America's doing it, it's being done with American weapons in violation of America's own laws, the Arms Export Control Act, and that America's financing Israel, and that America could push a button and stop Israel in a minute if it had the political will.
So really, the blame for this bloodbath fits as much with the U.S. as it does with Israel.
Yeah, you know, I saw Barack Obama today saying that he wants a ceasefire, and he's sending Kerry over there to get a ceasefire.
What he might as well have said is, well, of course, I could have called for a ceasefire all along, but only now am I deciding to, and I'm going to do it by sending Kerry not to Tel Aviv to read him the Riot Act, or to Jerusalem to read him the Riot Act, I'm going to send him to Cairo, where the al-Sisi dictatorship has already proven that they have no real interest in brokering some kind of deal with Hamas, or not a deal that they could possibly accept anyway.
That's quite right.
Egypt, as I said all the years under Mubarak, was a secret Israeli ally, and now it's just right out in the open.
This tinpot dictator al-Sisi hates and fears Hamas as much as the Israelis do, and is collaborating with them to squeeze it to death by shutting off the border crossing from Egypt into Gaza.
And he worked with the Israelis to try and create a fake ceasefire agreement in which the Palestinians weren't even consulted.
So you know, I remember the days, 1956, when the Israelis invaded Sinai and tried to grab it for themselves.
And our last great independent president, Dwight Eisenhower, told the Israelis, get out or else, and the Israelis got, and gave up Sinai.
Today you have a feeble President Obama, who says, well, we should be negotiating.
No, we're going to pick that up, Obama's responsibility, right on the other side of this break.
It's maybe the most important point of all here, aside from the casualties.
It's the great Eric Margulies, author of American Raj, ericmargulies.com.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies about Israel's slaughter of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip.
It's a big trumped up crisis.
Everybody knows, everybody knows that Netanyahu's lying like John Kerry, talking about, oh, we know Hamas kidnapped these kids.
He just wanted an excuse to go to war against Gaza.
But anyway, we were talking about the President's responsibility, and you brought up Dwight Eisenhower and how when he got on the phone, the Israelis came to heel.
How mad would Barack Obama have to get to get Benjamin Netanyahu to stop doing what he wants to do in the Gaza Strip, Eric?
Well, the President has the power to do it, but he doesn't have the will.
You know, elections are now on the horizon.
The Democrats are worried.
Republicans are beating the war drums.
So typically, the minute elections appear on the radar scope, the Israelis get away with whatever they want to do.
And that's exactly what's happening.
You know, Netanyahu, what he was really afraid of was that an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank had become a step closer after the Hamas-PLO accord.
And this is his way of breaking it.
I think he's done it very successfully with this attack on Gaza.
And yet the two-state thing was already dead.
That's what everybody said.
When Kerry's ridiculous joke of a half-hearted attempt fell, fell apart, it came to an end.
Everyone said, well, so that's it for two states.
Now what are we going to do, kind of thing, right?
So I mean, what is he even afraid of from this coalition government?
I don't get it.
Well, he was afraid that it at least presented a viable path.
Remember, Hamas has been demonized by the United States and by Israel as a terrorist organization.
We will never do business with terrorists.
That's mantra.
One, Israel has the right to defend itself, mantra number two.
And so as long as they could claim that beat the terrorism drums, they could avoid dealing with Hamas, which, by the way, was partially created by the Israelis way back when.
But the linking to Hamas to the more kosher PLO government, which is controlled by the U.S. and Israel, as I said, made it more acceptable as a partner and raised the threat that the U.S. might come back and push for some kind of Palestinian state.
Well, it's really not going to happen now, but what Prime Minister Netanyahu has done is ensured another decade of searing hatred between Arabs and Jews in the region.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I was wondering if maybe it had something to do with their joining U.N. organizations as kind of that whole General Assembly route to statehood that they kind of sort of started on, seemed like mostly as a bargaining chip.
But I guess the Abbas government was doing that without any kind of alliance with Hamas at the time anyway, right?
That's correct.
And it was really the Abbas government was taking orders from the U.S. and from Israel.
So that wasn't a big threat.
I think what's more of a threat for Israel is the spreading worldwide disinvestment movement in Israel.
It's spreading through academia and liberal left circles.
There's great anger at Israel, even amongst many American Jews are very unhappy with what Israel is doing.
It's lurched to the far right, is seen as antithetical to everything that the Jewish people stand for.
And so this is Netanyahu's way of fighting back.
And he has derailed any peace process.
And he's given his settlers, because this is really the settlers movement, he's given them more time to gobble up what's left of the West Bank.
Right.
And so, well, I want to get back to that in a second to ask you about the future, what you think is going to keep happening in both of these occupied territories.
But could you go back to what you said about Israel helping to create Hamas and elaborate a little bit there?
I know I can add two footnotes, and that's Richard Sale in UPI and Andrew Higgins in the Wall Street Journal, both of whom people can Google about this subject.
Yes.
Back in the, I don't know, I think it was in the late 70s, but don't pin me down on the date, exactly, Hamas sprang up as a religious welfare movement to provide schools and education and food and social welfare for the Palestinian people.
It was loosely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which was a social movement.
The Israelis saw this, and they thought, what a great way of splitting the Palestinian people, and they allowed Hamas to grow and even at least close their eyes, if not encourage the flow of funding to Hamas, which allowed it to develop very quickly and to become an important social movement amongst Palestinians.
Now the Israelis are kicking themselves for doing this.
Well, the leader of Hamas, Sheik Yassin, a very respected man, crippled in a wheelchair, he was very anti-Israeli, but at some point he called, and I saw the speech, he called for living with Israel, a peaceful resolution with Israel.
Shortly after that, he was assassinated by the Israelis.
Oh man, and you know what?
See I didn't realize that, that that was really what had proceeded, and you certainly sound convinced that that was the motive for killing him.
Well, you know, that's a supposition on my part.
It's not a fact that wasn't proven.
Well, and you know, this is the point where Ray McGovern always picks up and says, and of course, the assassination with that missile of Yassin, the old man in the wheelchair, the founder of Hamas, is what helped lead to the lynching of the Fallujah, the Blackwater Guards in Fallujah.
And then that was, of course, led to a whole other chain of dominoes falling down in the Iraq War and sectarian cleansing back and forth and death squads lining up against each other, etc.
Came from that original sin, in a way, not that everything was going fine with the occupation before that necessarily, but that is, in fact, how it played out, was it was riots and the Yassin Brigade, they called themselves or whatever, were the ones who killed the Blackwater Guards.
Good, good memory there.
Yeah, well, it's Ray McGovern, I'm relying on him, he's a smart guy too.
That's the advantage of being a radio host, I get to talk to all of you guys who know everything and so I remember as much as I can, without ever having to actually go to Gaza and risk dying myself, which is what a lot of people in Gaza are doing right now, including a lot of reporters, apparently.
In the last few days, Scott, the Israelis who claim to be doing targeted reprisals on Gaza to knock out missile sites are using 155mm self-propelled guns supplied by the United States to shell residential areas from long distance.
This is not even a line of sight, it's at a distance, they use air spotters or on the ground.
It is very crude, it's like firing heavy artillery down Madison Avenue in New York.
Well, it sort of seems like, I mean, I don't know what kind of ceasefire they'll get, but I guess my bet would be it'd be just like in 2009 and just like in 2012, where they just sort of back off and then they do this again, mowing the lawn, they call it, and so it'll just be status quo from now on, or what's going to happen here?
Oh, this will eventually end with a ceasefire, probably after some spectacular horror.
I mean, we're seeing now entire Palestinian families being wiped out by water shale.
Yeah, I mean, I've got footage here on my Twitter feed of streets littered with bodies, Eric.
We, I've been watching the pictures of those Palestinian bodies lying in the streets that appear on European television, but not on American.
That's really something else.
And it really does come back to the responsibility of the Americans for the money, for the support in the U.N., for all the weaponry involved, as you say, and it's just a shame that Americans don't get a chance to hear your side of the story on cable TV yet, or, you know.
Anyway, thanks very much, Eric, appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
The great Eric Margulies, everybody.
EricMargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast Peace Talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
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.
And face it, it's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
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