01/08/15 – Ramzy Baroud – The Scott Horton Show

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We got one of our guests today on the phone.
That's good.
It's Ramzi Baroud.
And he's got this article.
We're running it on antiwar.com.
Oh, no, we ran it yesterday, which means I don't even have it in front of me.
Hi, Ramzi.
How are you doing?
I am well.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing real good.
So here we go.
Time to move out the problem with Mahmoud Abbas and his authority.
So Mahmoud Abbas, that's, of course, the head of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank or on the West Bank, I guess.
And so I guess before we get all into your point about Abbas, and you've got quite a few important ones, can you first of all just refresh us on the recent history because there's a lot going on in Palestine politics here, never mind the upcoming Israeli elections, but I mean in the politics of Palestine, particularly in regards to the international institutions, etc.
So if you could just give us a quick refresher the last couple of weeks on what all is going on, then we'll have the context for your comments about Abbas.
So basically Secretary of State John Kerry twisted Mahmoud Abbas' arm, told him, listen, dude, you've got to go back to negotiations with Israel.
This whole ICC thing is not going to get you anything.
We will choke you financially.
We will not give you any money.
We will take all of the political validations and support we give you, and you are going to find yourself isolated.
Hamas is not going to be of any help to you.
The U.S. is more important.
Mahmoud Abbas indeed caved in and returned back to talks.
There was an eight-month time frame that John Kerry imposed.
Well, the time came and passed.
Nothing has happened.
The situation got a lot worse.
And so forth and so on.
And then another war was carried out by Israel last summer.
And once more Palestinians told Abbas, you've got to go to the ICC.
You can be a member within the matter of 90 days from applying.
Mahmoud Abbas still did not.
That is until a couple of weeks ago.
He goes back to the Security Council, and he asked them for a time frame for negotiations with Israel.
Rightly, the man said, we can't negotiate forever and ever and ever.
We've been negotiating for 20 years, and we got absolutely nothing.
But we lost most of our land during the last 20 years.
So we need a time frame.
If Israel does not abide by the time frame, we need the international community to impose a solution, to intervene.
He had a point there.
The thing is, the resolution did not pass.
And the U.S. vetoed the resolution anyway.
So even if it passed, the U.S. was going to block it anyway.
Mahmoud Abbas, it came across as out of sheer frustration, decided, okay, that's it.
We are going to go to the ICC, to the International Criminal Court.
He signed the papers.
And most likely, Palestine will be admitted as a member on April 1st.
Which means that Palestine can legally sue Israel for war crimes.
So that's really the context.
All right, now, as far as that goes, I forget now if it was your article or somewhere else I read this where they said that, you know, really all that would do is it would make Hamas susceptible to the International Criminal Court, but it wouldn't necessarily mandate that the ICC do anything about Israel, no matter what laws they break.
Right, right.
And the issue is open for all sorts of interpretations and debates.
Politicians and legal advisors are offering their two cents regarding the issue.
But I think the conventional wisdom regarding this issue so far is this.
Yes, Israel may refuse to allow any of its soldiers or war generals or politicians to stand for trial in front of the ICC.
But the ICC does have the mandate to issue verdicts and to hold Israelis accountable and in fact sentence them, even if they are not standing in front of the court.
Which means that Israeli politicians and generals and military advisors and so on and so forth would find it extremely difficult to travel in countries, including European countries that are members of the ICC or have ratified the ICC mandate.
It's going to indeed create that sort of difficulty that Israel has never experienced in the past.
So it will have that sort of impact, but of course there are no guarantees that an Israeli could in fact be tried and be sentenced and imprisoned, practically imprisoned for committing war crimes in Gaza or elsewhere.
But I would say that the move to the ICC is not a symbolic move.
It's a real move and it could have real consequences as far as Israel is concerned.
Also keep in mind if the ICC confirms that the illegal settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem constitute a war crime, it means that the European countries and the United States included will find it extremely difficult to do business with the settlement.
Because then they are going to be contributing to war crimes or they were going to be empowering those who are committing war crimes.
In other words, this is all very powerful, symbolically at least.
Now I'm sorry, we have to hold it right here and take this break.
It's Ramsay Baroud, y'all.
We'll be right back in just a second.
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Hey, you own a business?
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See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is scott at scott horton dot org.
Time to move out.
The Problem with Mahmoud Abbas and His Authority by Ramsay Baroud.
That's the piece at antiwar.com.
His website is ramsaybaroud.net and he's also the editor of palestinechronicle.com.
His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, Gaza's Untold Story.
You said in this first segment here that it is very important that the Palestinian Authority is taking these steps towards statehood basically any way they can since obviously the American-backed Oslo process is nothing but a big joke and officially failed again as of last spring.
And yet in the article you say the importance is not why Abbas is doing it.
He's doing it because he's desperate for some importance himself.
Is that right?
That's correct, Scott.
And that is really the crux of the issue here because if Abbas is genuine and is really intended on creating a situation that is favorable to his people and to ultimately achieve sovereignty and independence and freedom, then of course there's absolutely no problem with it.
But the issue here is that Mahmoud Abbas sits on the seat of, first, he has no mandate at all.
His mandate expired in 2009.
He has been renewing that democratic mandate among his friends in Ramallah, not going back to the Palestinian people, not holding any new elections.
When a new government was elected, he actually did his very best to prevent them from operating.
Half of the newly elected government is either killed or in prison.
And Mahmoud Abbas has no political mandate.
This is a man who thinks creatively at the age of 80, with all due respect to people who are at 80, but at 80 years old, thinking creatively all for himself and trying to keep the balance.
How do I stay in power?
How do my cronies stay in power and stay rich and rich all the time?
I'm losing American money and the political mandate that is given by Israel.
And at the same time, I need to throw a few crumbs to my people to give them the impression that I am doing something serious, that I'm actually making a difference in their life, that I'm not just sitting here and watching Israel build more settlements and kill more Gazans and so forth.
No, I'm actually doing something proactive.
For him, it's about winning time.
It's about creating distraction.
And it's about self-assertion, validation of Mahmoud Abbas himself, as opposed to a national liberation project for his people.
And that's the problem.
Yeah.
Well, so, but what's the alternative?
I mean, does he have junior people to him in the same organization who could do better?
Or is the solution to just...
I mean, because really the entire structure of the Palestinian Authority is...
Well, you correct me because I don't really know.
But it seems to me, I believe it's sort of part of the structure of the Oslo Agreement, right?
That the purpose of the PA is to implement Oslo, even though that thing's been dead in the water for 10 years or 20.
And that without the Palestinian Authority there, then we get back to the plain truth of the matter, which is that the West Bank is Israeli occupied territory, and they are responsible for the people on the West Bank.
And it sounds like, you know, that may reflect reality, but that may be an even worse situation for the people of the West Bank if they don't even have the Palestinian Authority to stand between them and Israeli martial law at all.
You know what I mean?
You're perfectly right, Scott.
I wouldn't correct anything that you just said.
That's exactly what is underway here.
The Palestinian Authority is like an organization that was, you know, created by some bureaucracy for a specific reason.
The reason doesn't exist anymore, but the organization needs to find a reason to carry on with its work so everybody can get paid at the end of the month.
You know, the Palestinian Authority was supposed to be the temporary authority that takes Palestinians from the negotiation stage through a state-building stage into finalizing the Oslo peace process and becoming an independent country at one point.
The deadline on that, guess what?
It was 2005.
So that was a decade ago.
Since then, the Palestinian Authority really had no purpose.
Basically, they are paying bills.
They are serving as Israel's kind of middleman.
Lots of the dirty business that Israel wants to carry out, security coordinations, arresting Palestinian troublemakers, and so forth and so on, is being carried out by the Palestinian Authority.
More importantly, the Palestinian Authority exists almost in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
If you bear with me for like 30 seconds here, the Fourth Geneva Convention and other international conventions says the responsibility, the safety, the protection, and the welfare of an occupied nation, like the Palestinians, is the responsibility of the occupying power.
Financially, Israel should be spending billions of dollars taking care of the Palestinians.
That's the price of occupation, at least.
Yet, the money is actually not coming from Israel.
Israel is benefiting from the money that's coming to sustain the occupation.
The one who is running the whole scam is the Palestinian Authority.
In the process, they are stifling about 40% of all funds.
So suddenly, you have these revolutionaries turned millionaires who are running all across the West Bank and Ramallah, operating massive five-star hotels, driving limousines, and so forth and so on.
So it's a charade, and everybody is benefiting.
Israel is the ultimate beneficiary, of course, because they are maintaining the occupation, not only at a very low cost, they are making lots of money from the settlement.
The Palestinian Authority is making a lot of money, but within the accepted cronies of Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah party.
The one who is actually suffering are the Palestinian people who do not have a mandated democratically elected leadership at the moment.
Right.
Okay, well, so what's next for the poor Palestinians?
Because it seems like, I mean, there's an optimistic, I guess, way to look at it, where, I guess, if the Israelis are forced for all intents and purposes to just admit that they have stolen the West Bank, and that they are officially annexing it, or that it is already de facto annexed, all the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, then, at that point, the Palestinians can pull a South Africa and just shame the minority Jewish government into allowing them one man, one vote, for the new binational state, or something like that.
On the other hand, it seems like much more likely to me would be an American-backed Nakba, too, where the Israelis say, fine, if we can't slowly steal the West Bank, we'll just push all y'all into the Jordan River and hope you can swim, or maybe round them all up and put them on trains to the Gaza Strip concentration camp and keep them there.
If they're pushed up against the wall, won't they do anything to maintain a super-majority Jewish state there?
To hell with democracy?
And would that mean a next Nakba?
And, in fact, let me go ahead and ask you this.
Can I hold you over to the next segment, and we'll do one more segment today, and then I can ask you about France, too?
Absolutely.
Would that be okay?
Okay, great.
It's Ramsey Baroud, y'all.
He's at Antiwar.com.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, you guys, I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm on with Ramsey Baroud from PalestineChronicle.com, and we're talking about the perpetual crisis on the West Bank of the Jordan River there, and occupied Palestine, well, and Gaza and East Jerusalem, too.
I don't mean to exclude all that.
I guess East Jerusalem counts as the West Bank.
Anyway, so, Ramsey, where we were at was I was musing about what an intractable situation.
What the hell is going to happen here?
I totally sympathize with the let's have a one-state solution where it doesn't matter what your religion or ethnicity is or any of that because it's an extremely limited constitutional republic where the government's only job is protecting people's rights, and so it doesn't matter who's in charge of it.
And yet, what kind of pipe dream is that?
Isn't it much more likely that if the two-state solution is abandoned, not that it's, as we discussed, not that anybody's making any real progress, but that if it's outright abandoned and it becomes sort of goes without saying that, okay, so-called Judea and Samaria now have been annexed by the Israelis, and then there's that fight for the Palestinians for their, at that point, majority rights, then won't that just lead to a whole other war, in which case the Palestinians are overmatched 10,000 to 1 by the American-backed Israeli army?
Right.
I don't see a way around it.
I think effectively since 1967 when Israel occupied the rest of historic Palestine, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, more or less this land has been shared.
It has been shared, though, under different kind of legal systems.
So they are all really living there.
I mean, the Israeli settlers start moving into the West Bank only months, really, after the West Bank was occupied.
And in the early 1970s, you had major settlements flourishing, and you had tens of thousands of Israeli Jews who were being brought to the West Bank in violation of international law.
The fact is, now we are looking at over half a million Israeli Jews who are living in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.
And you are looking at over 4 million Palestinians living in that land itself.
Don't forget that you have nearly 2 million Palestinian Arabs living as Israeli citizens, yes, second-class citizens, but still citizens nonetheless of the State of Israel.
Water is already shared.
Almost Israel gets a third of its water from the aquifers of the West Bank, and so forth and so on.
So the fact is, that land has been shared for a long time.
But the issue is, it has been shared under a system in which Israel is oppressing the Palestinians.
What is the harm of redefining these issues, where both of them could share that land based on equal rights, like in any other progressive democracy in the world, just to try to split land that is just really impossible to divide at this stage?
Right.
Well, I guess it did work eventually in South Africa.
I know that there have been a lot of Palestinians for a very long time who have said, hey, give us one man, one vote, because they can see through the charade of the two-state solution as you describe it.
It's just a mechanism for helping the Israelis accomplish their so-called facts on the ground there, as they do.
And so, you know, I guess the question though really is, if every Palestinian said one man, one vote, would American TV ever explain it?
And would that even change anything, you know?
It is sad.
It is incredibly sad how American media continue to look the other way.
I mean, even during the height of the latest Gaza war, the numbers did not change much as far as sympathies and understanding of the conflict, because the media continued to just instill this ignorant narrative of the situation in Palestine and Israel.
And as a result, the U.S. audience remained kind of almost completely outside the realm of reality in terms of understanding this.
So it's not Americans who deserve to be blamed, but the media that continue to misrepresent the conflict purposely, siding with Israel against the Palestinians.
And the result is we are so far removed in our understanding from that conflict, not just in Palestine, Israel, frankly, but the rest of the Middle East.
All right.
Well, now, so let me ask you about France and Islam and free speech and everything in three minutes.
What do you think?
Sure, let's try that.
Go right ahead.
What's your reaction to the situation in France?
I'll make it as general as I can.
Well, of course, number one, the magazine that was hit, you know, I have particular sympathy.
I do not respect the pornographic and tasteless art, but that's another issue.
I think politically they've been really quite progressive, and they've been kind of more just kind of equal in attacking and criticizing everyone else.
I don't think, though, that this is about art or about freedom of expression or about tolerance or lack thereof.
It's not a religious issue.
It's an entirely political issue.
France has, since the years of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, until, you know, a few years earlier when Sarkozy and Hollande came to power, France changed its politics entirely regarding the Middle East.
They were anti-Iraq war.
They became pro-intervention.
They led the war on Libya.
They led a war on Mali.
And now they are playing a very destructive role in Syria.
And as a result, when you support various militant groups in Libya that are affiliated with al-Qaeda, in order for you to achieve political ends in this country or that country, don't be surprised when there is a blowback, and when the war that you have been exporting to everybody else's country hits you back at home.
This is a political issue, and I think that's where the sad reality is, that this is being discussed within the context of religion and freedom of expression, and if people just understand this has very little to do with religion and everything to do with interventionalism and with politics.
Yeah, Juan Cole is saying, hey listen, presuming this is an al-Qaeda attack or al-Qaeda inspired attack, which it sure looks like with these guys being veterans of the Syrian war and all, that the action is in the reaction.
This is a tactic in a war, and they are trying to divide white Christian French from brown Muslim French, and they are trying to make matters worse for their own purposes, so don't fall for it.
And everybody is falling for it.
All the Islamists, they just hate free speech so much, you know how they are.
That's right, and you know, one thing that needs to be mentioned, what I was saying is that one of the victims is a Muslim by the name of Ahmed, a police officer who was killed defending the right for that magazine to convey the kind of information that had been really rather insulting and pornographic meaning to every Islamic symbol there is.
And I think that also needs to be mentioned, that this is ultimately not about religion and freedom of expression.
If we really need to understand the roots of that conflict, let's talk about Libya, Mali, Syria, and so forth.
And this is what the French media is particularly trying to avoid.
Right.
Well, and of course, if you really do want to talk about, you know, an Enlightenment Reformation and freedom of speech and freedom of religion in Muslim countries, that's a difficult argument to have in the middle of a decade and a half long war of radicalization of the entire region.
If you can call it any one thing, it's that.
So if this was September 10th and we were saying, hey, you know, we ought to have a real discussion about individual rights over in the Middle East, that would be entirely different than after Bush and Obama have set the entire place on fire and turned it upside down.
And made these kooks seem like they're prescient, you know.
Absolutely.
Somehow, Scott, again, every single time such things happen, we look at this with absolutely no context.
One of the top CIA people said yesterday, I think it was in the New York Times, he said this is the worst attack that we have seen in Europe since the attack on the London Underground in July 7th, which is really not true.
I mean, remember that crazy Norwegian guy who went and killed 77 people and so much else that happened of hate crimes and Nazi, neo-Nazi crime and all of that.
Again, they are so extremely selective in the way they present history because for them, there has to be a political price and the price most likely, as far as France is concerned, is most likely to be seen in Libya.
And it's going to be sooner than later.
Right.
Well, and part of it, too, is because they picked as their target this time this group of cartoonists and journalists, then that means that cartoonists and journalists as a self-identified group worldwide can only see it out of their own eyes as the target.
That what they are and what they do is the end all of the story because they're writing their own story.
And so they can't see it from the outside the way that you just say that this doesn't take place in a vacuum.
When these guys tried to go and fight in Iraq in 2005, they told the court because they were upset about the pictures of the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison.
When, as you mentioned, they went and fought in Syria and have come back.
And this is the kind of thing that I'm pretty sure you, but I know I've been warning for years, is going to be the guaranteed consequence of the Western powers supporting the Sunni based insurgency.
That was the enemy in the Iraq war against the Shiite side in Syria was these guys are going to come home with the Europeans and Americans to go into Syria to fight.
They're going to come home.
And then what's been their tactic since last century?
Try to bait the Western powers into occupying their countries, radicalize more generations, destabilize more sectarian or secular military type dictatorships or, or, you know, oil potentate dictatorships in the region, et cetera, to Al Qaeda.
This is a long war and we keep helping them make it that way.
As long as we're going over time, I figured I'd rant at you for a minute there.
But anyway, it's just sad to see that, you know, especially like I'm following all these journalists on Twitter and to them, this is only and completely about cartoons and about journalism and about, you know, the pen versus the sword and this kind of thing.
It's the only frame that they can see it.
It really is.
I mean, if this happened, if this happened years and years ago, I can understand because there is not much context in which we can draw from.
But this happened, this happened just weeks after the CIA torture reports for crying out loud.
It happened a couple of weeks after Seymour Hersh said that drugs have been used to rape prisoners in Afghanistan.
It happened after all these horrible things and yet not one single mention in mainstream media of any of these issues.
And if you do bring it up, then you are a provocateur and you are, you know, you're just out of your mind of why would you be so sensitive to bring this up.
Another thing is these guys claim to be affiliated with Al Qaeda in Yemen.
On that very day, 37 people were killed in Yemen as a result of attacks by Al Qaeda in Yemen.
Very little of this was even mentioned in the media.
Thirty-seven people, nobody stood in solidarity, no hashtags, not my name is Mohammed, my name is this or that.
Because, again, they are less important and less relevant and their death is not going to serve any political purpose.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
They might as, the targets, the victims might as well have all been Al Qaeda themselves for as much as Americans or Western media interest care, or for that matter, our populations really too.
I'm sorry I've kept you so long today on the show, but thank you so much for coming back on, Ramsey.
It's great to talk to you again.
Thank you, Scott.
I really appreciate it.
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Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, Al, 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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