06/26/15 – Annie Robbins – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back.
It's the Scott Horton Show, I'm him.
Our first guest on the show today is Annie Robbins, editor at large over at Phil Weiss's blog Mondo Weiss.
He's got a whole stable of great writers over there, she's one of them.
Welcome to the show Annie, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, thanks for calling me Scott, it's an honor to be here.
Very happy to have you here.
So first and foremost, lots to talk about, but first and foremost, foreign direct investment in Israel dropped by 50% in 2014.
From what to what?
How big of a deal is that?
Well I think it's a radical deal.
I think we're seeing the effects of years of, you know, efforts by the BDS movement and also just the gradual awakening of the public to the consequences of dealing with Israel and that basically it's just a bad investment.
It's common sense that it's a bad investment.
And now, so what kind of dollars are we talking about there?
It's how many billions decreased from what to what?
Oh I actually don't know the specifics of the billions.
I think that it's not, I don't think that that's the main focus here.
I think that the focus is on why it's decreasing.
The expert that I wrote about in Israel said it was a combination of last summer's war and BDS.
So...
Well it says here and it's in, I guess, Israeli dollars or whatever.
I'm not familiar with the symbol actually.
It's not U.S. dollars but it's, yeah maybe it is the symbol for the shekel.
But they're saying down from 10 billion to 5.7, 10.5 to 5.7.
So that's huge, right?
That's more than all American aid to Israel every year.
It's a huge amount of money.
Huge amount.
So I'm just saying that's not, it's not like we're going from, you know, a hundred million to fifty million.
We're talking about billions and billions of dollars.
No, we're talking about billions of dollars.
But you're seeing the effect here of years in the making.
I believe, you know, I mentioned in my article that back in 2013 we reported that investment committees for European banks were considering recommending their institutions borrow loans to Israel companies with economic links to the occupied territories.
And these companies, these investment committees, they don't, I don't think they're looking at whether someone should boycott or not.
They're looking at what a good investment is.
Investors could become complicit in not only just morally what's going on over there, but because Palestine is, you know, going to the International Criminal Court and they just yesterday they went and submitted documents including the crime of apartheid, war crimes, crimes against prisoners, and 23 counts in all.
In fact, we have an excellent article up by our Ramallah correspondent Alison Degger right now with an exclusive about that.
And so at the time, two years ago, I think it was referred to as an economic tsunami, if something like this happened.
The mother of all fears, it was called, by a Haraz journalist.
Or I think that was the Israeli government.
I think it was Bennett.
So these kinds of, this tsunami, so to speak, has been building for a long time.
And what we're seeing in the last year is we're really seeing an explosion of press about it.
But it's been building for 10 years.
The BDS movement has been building for 10 years and there's just so much more awareness now and people really talking about it and not having fear talking about what's going on in Palestine and Israel.
And now the BDS movement, I don't know if there's a good metaphor you could use or something.
I don't know, is there a way that you could help us to understand, maybe miles per hour or something, just how big it's grown, how fast it's moving compared to what it was a few years ago?
Well, you know, I'd say it seems to me that it's growing exponentially.
I'm not an expert on the BDS movement.
Of course, I'm part of it.
I support it.
But, you know, I'm not a spokesman for it by any means.
But it seems that the growth on campuses and certainly since, I mean, I'd have to, I'd have to, myself, I'd have to say it was around January of last year when the Scarlett Johansson soda stream thing exploded in the press with the Super Bowl, that all of a sudden it really became front-page news.
And you could see, and this takes us back to investment, you could see the stock started plummeting for SodaStream, which I personally think was just people having, you know, investors fearing they're a running-off thinking ship.
Right.
And then Netanyahu started, you know, he mentioned BDS or the boycott like 18 times in the AIPAC speech.
Kerry, John Kerry, I think in Munich, mentioned, you know, repercussions of not coming to a peace agreement and boycott and and everybody exploded because he said that.
And all of a sudden people just started really acknowledging and talking about the boycott movement, which was just, you know, people thought was fringe.
Well, of course, now it's just every day.
I think they called it recently, they called the boycott movement responsible for 9-11.
I think that was Netanyahu.
A blood libel.
I mean, Nazis.
I mean, they're going crazy over there.
But unfortunately, you know, they just changed their framing.
They never change their policies.
That's what it seems like.
So all these words, you know, I know they could, you know, turn this around pretty quickly if they change some of their policies.
Israeli government.
Yeah, sure.
Well, no doubt about that.
And that's the thing.
The reason they got to say, oh, Nazi, this and that is because they got to try to talk about anything but the occupation.
And, you know, I was actually going to save that for the second segment because it could be such a long rabbit trail to go down.
But I wonder if you had noticed, I guess you must have noticed, it seems to me that I never, you know, it seems like if I was a right wing Israeli nationalist, I could come up with bogus excuses.
I would call it security or something.
I would say, well, we, you know, we have to have this occupation in the West Bank to prevent the terrible suicide bomber.
Some kind of nonsense.
But instead they say, no, we're real good on gay rights.
Oh, this, that, whatever.
Like I'm just supposed to pretend like I don't know that Palestinians exist.
And I'm only supposed to think about how good Israeli Jews have it.
Wow.
What a great country you guys have.
I almost forgot that the millions of people living in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem have no rights at all.
You almost got me with your little pinkwashing thing there.
Right.
Well, you know, and calling me a Nazi, boy, did that scare me off.
From my perspective, after years of being involved in this movement, I'd have to say the ad hominem attack, just the, you know, attack of the person and not the argument, is their number one tool in Israeli Hezbollah, is always just demonizing your opponent.
So what I see is this constant shifting of narrative and framing and the way it's all described, just a big PR fluff, but no changing of the policy.
And the thing is, until the policy is changed, this won't stop.
There's not, you know, I always think about, like Kennedy said, you can't fool all the people all the time, but some of the people all the time.
And this is just a completely unsustainable narrative going on.
Nobody's going to believe, I mean, definitely it's okay for people not to have rights and not to be equal.
That's just not a share our values kind of American thing.
So it's really exposing the truth and getting more and more Americans aware of what's going on over there, because we've just been inundated with this share our values kind of propaganda for decades, really.
And we really don't share their values because we are not an ethnic nationalist state.
We are a civic nationalist state.
So it's a huge difference.
All right.
All right.
Hold it right there.
It's Annie Robbins, editor at large at the Mondoweiss blog, mondoweiss.net.
And we're talking about the BDS.
We'll be right back.
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All right.
So welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton show.
Talking with Annie Robbins from the Mondoweiss blog, that's mondoweiss.net.
Phil Weiss and his merry band there.
And we're talking about BDS.
We're talking about how it went from kind of a small little fringe sort of thing to now a big enough thing where bottom line reading businesses who don't have politics are looking at the cost and benefit of continuing to do business with Israel, the apartheid state.
And this is really turning into a big thing.
And I'm sorry to change the subject from Israel real quick, but it's just this breaking news that just came in.
It's almost unbelievable in this climate.
But as reported here at Mondoweiss, a little bit off the subject there to a Boehner aide, John Boehner's chief of staff told the blacks, the Congressional Black Caucus in the House of Representatives, that we are doing you people a favor by allowing you to even be seated here.
And so now there's a gigantic controversy.
And of course, I'm lying.
This was a Netanyahu aide said that to all the Palestinians in the Knesset.
I'm reading that from Mondoweiss.net.
Just think about that for a minute.
If if John Boehner or, you know, the leader of the Republicans in the House or the Senate said that to Jews or blacks in the American Congress, that, you know, still this is our country and you're only here at our pleasure in this kind of thing.
Can you imagine?
And that's what that's where we left off at the break there, Annie, as you were saying, OK, yeah, shared values.
You really want to enumerate them, because first and foremost, this is not an ethnic state.
Maybe at one point it was, but it's not anymore.
And in fact, in great measure, because Jews helped other minorities win those battles and make sure that it's not anymore.
Well, it's interesting you should bring up that story.
I actually haven't read the story on Mondoweiss, but I did.
But I did read it at Haratz the other day.
It was an outrageous event that happened.
And that's because I'm terrible at words.
It's OK.
Yeah.
As I recall, they were this completely racist law.
One of the many of the 60 which that have passed.
And it prevents people from it prevents Palestinian people from having their loved ones or their mates or their husband, wife or family live with them in Israel if they come from, say, the West Bank or even East Jerusalem.
And, you know, it's it's just completely racist laws.
So this was coming.
It was I think it was coming up for it for re.
It was apparently some sort of temporary measure when it first when it was first applied.
And I think that was 13 years ago.
Excuse me, but I don't have this information right in front of me.
So with coming up for a re, they just keep reestablishing it the same way with the state of detention, for example, where they just randomly arrest you with no charges or anything and then just keep you until they sort of want to, I don't know, find something against you.
And then they just reestablish that over and over and over and over again.
So it's the same kind of policy.
And I believe they were having a debate about it.
And this guy said, you know, you're lucky to be here.
And and yeah, it was a huge screaming match took place.
You've got to see the video of it, which I'm sure must be up at our site by now.
Go to the front page.
And it's just outrageous.
The stuff goes on there.
It's like nothing you could imagine.
In fact, I think Phil and Adam wrote a great article the other day about it was sort of a farce on what's happening with our Confederate flag and the debate in this country and if that were going on in Israel.
And it would just never happen there because any kind of debate because they don't recognize the, well, they must recognize it, but they completely accept this sort of ethnic supremacy going on over there where people have just completely different rights.
And they keep saying they don't.
But of course, well, I think this gets us back to the BDS thing here is this is what's really helped, I guess, to push the BDS along, is that the myth of the peace process is now finally dead.
Nobody believes that the Israeli government ever means to negotiate away their rule over the occupied territories.
And so so everybody is asking, so now what?
Because it's either force march them all into the Jordan River or down into Egypt or into the Sinai Peninsula or some kind of thing, maybe kill them all or, you know, try and trail a tear style, which is something that I guess is over the line for politics in Washington.
I like to think it is.
Or their other choice is to just keep the status quo forever, which, you know, mankind mostly other than the middle part of North America and and Israel itself agree is just not tenable for them to where half the population is ruled with no rights whatsoever under the authority of their prime minister.
Yeah, the so-called peace process was just a process that just pushed this down.
It was a pushing it down the road was the process itself.
So that as long as Israel was involved in this in one way or another, then, you know, then they could say, well, it's going somewhere, but it was just getting worse.
And of course, they're just eating up more and more and more of the land as this process goes on.
But, you know, that that's just kind of the mask has been pulled off that certainly at the last election when you know, I mean, in the last, you know, this last nine months that happened last year, it just became apparent with the whole I think Kerry said the poof moment that they were just never going to be naming their borders.
They will they just refuse to put a proposal together.
And just recently, there's this new sort of Hasbara, so to speak, that Netanyahu really wants to really wants to begin this negotiation process again, which is ridiculous.
It's it's just a recycling of the no partner for peace thing.
Because repeatedly, repeatedly, they refuse in any kind of negotiation to put a proposal of borders on the table.
It's always a final status issue or something like that.
It's just never, you know, the court had over and over 2012 before always asking them, well, what borders and they won't do it.
So people don't nobody believes especially now with the most racist, you know, parliament there's ever been over there.
People just don't believe that this is an option anymore.
So really, what you're looking at is you're looking at just saying, well, just make it okay that these people don't have rights.
Okay, it's not that big of a deal.
We'll make their economy better or something.
It's just it's just ridiculous.
You just can't get people to to agree that it's okay that people can live with generations and generations of with no right, you know, well, the argument out of the bed in the middle of the night and stuff like this.
Yeah, I mean, it is just I'm kind of insulted by the low quality of the argument, you know?
Oh, yeah.
So there's Jim Crow apartheid rule in the south.
But us white people in the suburbs of Washington, DC live great.
And so isn't that a great argument?
I mean, who's buying that?
That doesn't make any sense.
Look, Israeli Jews in Tel Aviv have a great life.
And so that somehow is is a stand in for an argument for the perpetuation of the occupation in the West Bank.
It's not working on me.
I'm sorry.
They're trying.
The argument has always been the argument has always been really based on the central central theme is demonize the other people.
You know, they're terrorists.
They're like this.
It's all their fault, you know, and that's been going on for so long.
And I think, you know, back before the Internet, you know, so last century or whatever, that might have like worked on the public.
But now we've got these kids that, you know, unlike myself, that, you know, grew up with Martin Luther King Day when in kindergarten, literally, and grew up with this dream that this was represented America.
And so they're just like, you know, even if you're 13, 14, 15, 16, whatever age you are, when you start hearing about this over there, it's like they just it's just not a sustainable.
It's not a sustainable argument at all, because there is no argument other than these guys are all demons, you know, or or it's all their fault or, you know, blame the victim.
I mean, there's just no meat in the argument at all.
And because Israel continues to refuse to change their policies.
In fact, their policies just keep getting worse and worse and more embedded and steeped in this racism.
I don't know, it's just, the more you look at it, the more you expose it, the more people see the truth or read about it, or just, you know, peel the layer behind it.
It's just a big, ugly mess.
And so that's what's, that's what's so challenging, I think, of why they're having, you know, Sheldon Adelson is having like conferences in Las Vegas to counter BDS is because it just keeps trying to come up with, you know, these PR gambits.
But you know, there's just no putting lipstick on that pig, right?
Yeah, that's the thing about it.
And you're totally right about the internet there.
You know, I grew up watching from the time I was a little kid, I always watched Tom Brokaw and, and Rather and Jennings to in the PBS NewsHour, that kind of thing with my dad, and never in my life have I seen on TV, where they throw up a picture map, a bird's eye view of Israel and say, Now, this part here is the occupied territory here.
And that's where they lost in 1967.
And they've been occupied ever since.
And this is what they're working on.
Now, sometimes they'll talk about the peace process, this and that.
But only on the assumption that, hey, you better already know what we're talking about, because we're never going to explain it to you who's occupying who, and they always frame it.
And Phil and I've talked about this on the show many times, too.
They always frame it that, oh, it's land for peace, land for peace, as though we start out with Israel rightfully owns some land, and they're under this terrorist threat that if you don't give up some of this land to us, then we're going to wage terrorist attacks against you all the time.
And that is the way the entire issue is framed to certainly the talk radio right in America, and I think just most Americans in general.
But then we get to what you're talking about.
And especially with Web 2.0, Facebook and Twitter, there's just no arguing that the people of Gaza have Israel under siege.
Now, you could try to say that, and maybe in in 1992, it would have worked, but it just does not work now.
And especially, I think, last summer's slaughter, canned hunt against the people of Gaza there was the real turning point of turning points.
And Twitter, even more than Facebook or anything else, because you just had people with 3G phones in Gaza, they take a picture, they tweet it, and it gets retweeted.
And and all of a sudden, they have an equal voice with Jake Tapper on CNN.
They have just as much coverage as he does, as far as getting the truth out to people.
Hey, here's what my neighborhood looks like now.
Does that look like a surgical strike to you?
And then no, it doesn't.
Last summer was so horrifying.
I was in Lebanon at the time, and I was just, I was so petrified, I could not write a thing.
And I just started I woke up, you know, of course, the bombing campaigns, which would begin, you know, when it first started after midnight, and the whole family's being taken out.
And, you know, it was like, one o'clock in the morning, and everybody in the house where I was in was just, you know, we were just glued to the television.
And I go on the Twitter, and I'm seeing at the same time at 10 in the morning, like, protests breaking out in Chicago, and I just got goose pimples, and we just started crying and started collecting all these photographs.
And so mostly, I collected photographs of protests.
And right now, I think that that particular article worldwide protest against the, I forget the name, but it ended up being, I think, one of our heaviest traffic, but of the of the year last year, but there were literally hundreds of protests going on all over the world, people just every single weekend going out, not in different places.
I mean, I'm talking about, you know, the same like London and Amsterdam, and you know, all these going out weekend after weekend after weekend with these, these groups just growing.
I mean, you know, South Africa, just, you know, huge, a million people protest.
And it was really I think the whole world was just so horrified by it.
You can't hide that kind of you just can't hide that kind of gruesomeness.
And then the excuse is like, well, look what's happening in Syria.
It's like, excuse me, you know, excuse me, if we were blatantly, outwardly, funding billions of dollars to ISIS, that's really the equivalent of, in my opinion, the equivalent of our government funding this kind of slaughter.
And, you know, but I don't know, I just can't explain it.
They say, well, why not Syria?
It's like, Hello, are we supporting that?
You know, and well, well, and even besides the point, the worst, worst civil war in the world is the model and anything less than that is fine.
I know these people supposedly share our values.
And we're and we're, you know, but at the same time, when we're over there, I mean, oh, I can't get into it.
Or, you know, my opinion about what's happening over in Syria and Iraq.
Well, well, yeah, I mean, we don't want to go too far afield.
But I think the real point is, the real point is that things have really changed here.
And that's why all the screaming and hollering and accusing BDS of doing 911 and accusing BDF, BDS of, you know, the death camps in Poland, or you know, whatever else they can try to do is because it's because they've got no argument, they can only change the subject.
And I think that's wearing real thin.
I think things are really changing here, you know, as you're writing about and as as you said, this Allison Degger piece, where Palestine is officially seeking to charge Israel with apartheid and war crimes.
Exactly.
And you know, she's over there.
I haven't read anything in the mainstream media as complete as that article.
And it's an exclusive on our front page right now.
I'd recommend everybody see it.
Also, our correspondent in Gaza, Dan Cohen, is excellent, excellent coverage.
So, you know, I mean, not to plug our site too much, but I love our site.
And I know it's great.
I read it every day.
And I sure hope everybody else does too.
And with that, we're over time, I'm gonna finally let you go.
But thank you so much for coming on.
It's really an honor.
I'm so pleased you called me.
It was great to have you on.
Appreciate it.
Okay, bye.
All right, y'all.
That is Annie Robbins.
She is editor at large of Mondo Weiss.
That's the great Philip Weiss, mondoweiss.net.
And there's a whole bunch of great writers there too.
So go check them out.
We'll be right back in a second.
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