04/03/15 – Ramzy Baroud – The Scott Horton Show

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On the line, I've got Ramzi Baroud from ramzibaroud.net.
He's a media consultant, an internationally syndicated columnist, and editor of palestinechronicle.com.
His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, Gaza's Untold Story.
His latest article at antiwar.com is called How Palestinians Can Defeat Apartheid.
Welcome back to the show, Ramzi.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me back, Scott.
Very happy to have you back on the show here, and very happy to address this subject matter with you, or have you address it for us.
So, a lot of stuff happened in the recent Palestinian elections that seemed to really change the game, in a sense.
And I guess the most important of those was Netanyahu's brief moment of honesty there when he said, Look, there's never going to be a second Palestinian state.
We're never going to allow there to be a Palestinian state.
All of Israel belongs to us, from Jordan to the sea, the Jordan River to the sea, etc.
And so, screw the Palestinians.
And then he tried to walk that back, but nobody believed the walk back.
Everyone knew that he was telling the truth when he said that.
It seems like you're kind of looking at the silver lining on Netanyahu's honesty about his horrible policy.
How's that?
Netanyahu's honesty surprised a lot of people, including his own supporters.
Not that they were not familiar with his rhetoric or with his actual practical policies that no Palestinian state will be established.
And also the racist rant that happened just before the election.
But the fact that he actually articulated it.
The idea was, we all knew that from the very beginning.
The Americans knew that as well.
They knew that Netanyahu had no intentions of ever going back to the peace process or allowing a Palestinian state to be established, etc.
But the fact is, he wasn't supposed to say it.
He said it because he was in panic.
He panicked because exit polls or the last polls that were conducted just before the elections showed that the Zionist bloc, the Labour Party and their allies were actually to net with Netanyahu.
He thought it's over for him if he doesn't come up with something that is so strong and so powerful that is going to pull in the right-wing constituency around him.
And he did succeed in doing so.
But of course, he exposed the farce that we've all known from the very beginning.
Yeah, he was desperate.
He came out and he admitted the truth that really it is one state.
But so now what for the Palestinians, Ramzi?
So basically, the Palestinians now have to really contend with this reality.
Mahmoud Abbas, you know, the head of the Palestinian Authority and his entourage.
I mean, they are keenly interested in maintaining the Sharad.
They want it because they are making a lot of money.
They are becoming rich and millionaires at the expense of the suffering Palestinians.
But they can't maintain that Sharad any longer.
Netanyahu kind of really pulled the rug from underneath their feet.
And now they have to accept the fact that the Palestinians are running out of patience.
But my message was really to Palestinian intellectuals and people who are speaking outside that corrupt circle of the Palestinian Authority to really kind of congregate and start to think not around peace process discourses, not around, you know, this kind of old mantras and slogans, but to rather face the facts the way they are.
We are put in an extremely tough position here.
There is no peace process, nothing to be expected from Netanyahu, his government, or frankly, even his opponents, even those who are supposedly the liberals and the Labour Party.
They are actually quite as bad, except that they are much softer in how they articulate.
That's quite terrible policies that they have.
So Palestinians have got to, you know, use some introspection here, think outside that whole peace process, Sharad, and think of ways to unify their rank politically, but also unify the narrative.
Our narrative is really quite disconnected at this point between Hamas and Fatah and people who are in diaspora and people who are at home, Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship, millions of refugees, you know.
So the narrative is becoming quite disjointed, frankly, and we can't deny this anymore.
We can't just pretend, no, no, everything is fine and we carry on with our lives.
We've got to actually think of an alternative way to repair that Palestinian identity in order for us to actually be able to deal with this reality created by Netanyahu's becoming a prime minister for the fourth time.
Yeah, and it's very important how you point out in here about all the, I guess, millions now of Palestinians living in refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, and everywhere else, and their right of return, and you're not talking about, well, they can come back to the West Bank.
You're saying so-called Israel proper, that, hey, as long as it's one state, it's time for these people to be allowed to come home.
And, you know, I guess I'll go ahead and cut right to the chase here.
I'm afraid that if it ever comes to the point where the Israelis have to, the Israeli Jews have to choose between a democratic state or killing all the Palestinians in another Nakba, another Trail of Tears type forced march, kick all the Gazans out, force them into the Sinai Peninsula, drown all the citizens of the West Bank in the Jordan River or whatever, that they'll just do that.
That they'll be damned if they're going to ever give up their 80-20 supermajority, just as much as they'll be damned if they're going to ever give up the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip at all.
And so I wonder whether, even though, I mean, it sounds absolutely crazy.
Hell, they did it before, and it's crazy what they're doing now with the permanent occupation.
And I wonder whether maybe if there's a real declaration, hey, this is one state, and we all want one man, one vote, and we all want to participate.
We want equal rights, that they'll just kill you all.
Well, the problem, Scott, of course, I agree with you that they see this as a worst-case scenario.
And most of them are not even open for even to dialogue around the principle.
But the issue here, the problem is not created by us.
It's created by Israel.
For 20 years, the peace process has been kind of sidelined.
The central issue that matters to Palestinians, Jerusalem, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, territorial integrity, sovereignty, even their economy.
They can't even control what do they import and what do they export.
Even the taxes that are collected on their behalf are also collected by Israel, which they use to manipulate the Palestinians.
You kind of play along, then we give you the money that we owe you.
You don't play along, then we'll hold it.
So you are near starvation, then we'll give you a little bit, and so forth and so on.
So it's not like Palestinians really have so many options, and they are kind of selecting the most difficult of these options.
There is a reality, and that reality has been created by the Israeli occupation.
And the Palestinians now find themselves living with Jews between the river and the sea.
The only thing that really makes this a not-one-state solution is the fact that there are two sets of laws.
One applies to Jews, one applies to Arabs.
And the Arabs are being discriminated against and are being expelled from their land and so forth and so on.
So would it be more reasonable to think of this impossible scenario in which half a million Israeli Jews are being evicted out of the West Bank, entire cities demolished that are the current settlements, and a whole host of these fantastic ideas that most likely will never happen, as opposed to, well, this is the reality.
We are already living on this land.
Why can't we share?
Why can't we streamline the laws so that they would apply on both of us equally, as opposed to create segregation that, again, at this point, it really is impossible to create.
And it's impossible because Israel made it impossible.
Maybe at one point in the past, maybe in 1967, it was still a possibility.
Maybe earlier it was still a possibility.
Even when Oslo was signed in 1993, maybe it was still a possibility.
But at this point, if you look at the map and the way that the settlements are basically scattered throughout the West Bank, where Palestinians are living in Israel and Israelis living in Palestine, where the right of return can never be achieved unless there is a level of territorial integrity for Palestinians.
And all of these things have become impossible because of the occupation.
So if Israelis find themselves having to make these drastic decisions of another ethnic cleansing of Palestine, that's their problem.
They have created that situation, and they are accountable to international law and to humanitarian laws in this regard.
Yeah, I absolutely agree with that.
And I guess, is it your position that Oslo was always a scam, even under Yitzhak Rabin?
If he had not been assassinated, do you think it would have even been possible to have the two-state solution then?
It really has always been a scam.
And I remember, Scott, when I was still a kid.
I mean, I was 19, 20 years old at the time.
And I remember protesting in the town of Ramallah as a student at a local university there, with a whole bunch of kids basically protesting against it, saying it's a scam and this is exactly what happened.
Everything that we said was going to happen in fact happened.
Even the economic part of the agreement signed in Paris in 1995, even that was not respected.
Forget about sovereignty and rights of return and Jerusalem and all of these really, really tough decisions.
Even the fact that Palestinians cannot export their yogurts or their beer or import anything from Jordan without going through Israel, even that, the Paris Protocol of 1995, none of that was implemented.
From the very get-go, that scam was really written all over the field.
I just don't know how they managed to sustain it for 20 years.
Well, now, so let me ask you this, because I read recently that the West Bank settlements especially, that they're all the recipients of massive subsidies from the government.
And, of course, they're protected by the IDF way out there on the frontier in somebody else's land and that kind of thing.
So it seemed like, in a way, that that could just be turned off like a switch.
And that if they don't get their subsidies, they'll have to come back to the other side of the green line.
And that maybe, assuming the political will was there in Israel, that they wanted to choose to be a Jewish state and a democracy still.
And that they realized the only way to do that would be to give up the West Bank, that even the right-wing zealots out there in the occupied territories, they would really have no choice but to come home if the subsidies were just shut off.
Is that outside the realm of possibility now?
I think it is outside the realm of possibility, not because it's not possible, but because there is no debate in Israel about the identity.
At least among the Jewish communities in Israel, there is no debate about the Jewish identity of Israel.
There is near total consensus within the right-wing, the ultra-nationalist, the left-wing, the orthodox.
Everyone is in agreement regarding that.
None of them think that the settlements should be abandoned at any point.
In fact, the settlements, especially in the so-called greater Jerusalem area, the ones in the north, the ones in the center, they have been so incorporated into so-called Israel proper to the extent that many of the settlers living there are actually not even religious or nationalist or Zionist in that sense.
These are people who are looking for cheap housing because of the subsidies that you just spoke about.
So it's not like there is this disconnect between the settlements and Israel.
It has been incorporated into Israel in terms of the economy, in terms of the geography, in terms of the body politic in general, to the extent that there is really no discussion there whatsoever.
Not like in a year or so they will realize, well, we have to make a choice between being democracy or being Jewish, and we have to take some drastic measure.
That has never really been part of the discussion in Israel.
And I doubt that it will ever be, really, until they are confronted by Palestinians on one hand, but also by the international community that allowed this to carry on for so long.
Right.
Okay, now listen, I know that you have to go, and I've kept you over time here, but I sure do appreciate you coming back on the show, Ramzi.
It's great to talk to you.
Thank you very much, Scott.
You take care.
You too.
So that's the great Ramzi Baroud.
You can find him at original.antiwar.com slash Ramzi dash Baroud.
And RamziBaroud.net and Palestine Chronicle.
His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter.
His latest article is called How Palestinians Can Defeat Apartheid.
And the one before that is Netanyahu, the Myth Buster.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast Peace Talks have gone nowhere.
Hey y'all, 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.
Help support CNI at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
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