Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Of course, we're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at AntiWar.com slash radio.
Stay tuned, that awesomeness with Gareth Porter and Flint Leverett will be coming up in just about half an hour from now.
But first, we're going to go to Eric Gares, he's the founder and the boss man at AntiWar.com.
Welcome to the show, Eric, how's it going?
Great, thank you for having me.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
Alright, so let's talk about Gaza, let's talk about the free Gaza flotilla.
Where do you want to start?
Let's start with the basic conditions, you know, if there's anybody in the audience who's anything like me, not too long ago, hell, I didn't know anything about Gaza or Israel or who's who.
I saw a clip the other day of a guy on TV saying, the Palestinian-Israeli issue confuses me, which one is the one that's throwing the rocks?
So I was thinking, maybe we could just kind of start with the basic who's who here as a setup for, you know, and what it has to do with the American people as a setup for the recent news over the weekend.
Okay, well, Gaza is a part of what was formerly Palestine, now considered the Palestine Territory.
And a few years ago, Israel pulled most of their settlements out of Gaza and left it to the Palestinians.
But shortly thereafter, they imposed a blockade on Gaza, which has been going on now for about three years.
The blockade keeps out most people and most goods.
Things like food, basic items of necessity, many of them are banned outright, but everything else has to go through checkpoints.
So for example, requests for medical supplies often take six months to a year, and given the bureaucracy of Israel, there are expiration dates for allowing them.
So generally, the bureaucracy of Israel keeps out medical supplies, things like basic food items, as well as the fact that livestock, fresh meat, spices, cloth for making clothing, tarps for making huts, cement for building buildings, these are all outright prohibited.
They're not allowed to be brought into Gaza.
Well, and cement, I think, is really important there, because most people, they may remember the Operation Cast Lead from about a year and a half ago, right, when Obama was coming into power, aka Operation Shooting Fish in a Barrel there, and they pretty much destroyed Gaza.
There was a recent report, I think recently, that said that they've basically been unable to recover from that at all, because of the lack of cement, for example.
That's right.
What you have in Gaza is equivalent to the movie Escape from New York.
They've basically shoved a million and a half Palestinians into a very small area, and they keep them there.
They occasionally go in and bomb a few places, and will send in some ground troops, but essentially they leave Gaza to themselves.
They're not allowed to have any resources, they're not allowed to travel outside of Gaza, and they're not allowed to conduct their basic businesses, or give them any sort of quality of life.
It's not even just permanent occupation, like what's going on in the West Bank.
I guess the settlers have been withdrawn, as you said, and then they turned the whole Gaza Strip into a prison.
So how many people live there?
What, like two million people, right?
Well, there hasn't been a census since 2007.
At that time, it was a million and a half, but it's definitely increased.
And I think I read that the majority of the people of the Gaza Strip are under 18?
That's correct.
That's correct.
Almost 40% are 14 or under.
Wow.
Under 14.
Okay.
All right.
So now let's talk about this flotilla.
Okay.
Well, one other thing that's worth mentioning, in 2006, there was an election in the Palestinian territories that was heavily touted by both Israel and the United States.
The only problem that they had was that Hamas won that election.
And so Hamas, as a result of a split between Fatah and Hamas, Hamas basically runs what's left of the government of Gaza.
They are the only ones providing any sort of basic services, health care, education, that sort of thing.
Because of the blockade, Israel has given Hamas a monopoly on what is allowed in the Gaza Strip.
In fact, I might even add there, Garris, that after the election of 2006, Hamas had won, but they were still in a position where they were going to have to work out some kind of coalition with Fatah, the former bad guys, now the preferable group in Gaza.
But then there was this operation through the Egyptians to arm up Fatah, and Condoleezza Rice and them attempted to have Fatah wage this civil war against Hamas in Gaza, which of course failed, and all the weapons just ended up in the hands of Hamas, and their power was even more solidified.
That's right.
And of course, the U.S. and Israel both have constantly armed or helped one side or the other.
The fact is that in the early days of Hamas, Israeli intelligence was helping Hamas in order to combat Fatah, who at that time they saw as their major enemy.
Now Fatah is their quote-unquote ally.
Right.
They said, you know what we need is some good, reliable, religious right-wingers instead of these secular commie types.
That's right.
So between active and passive actions on the part of the Israeli government, they have helped Hamas achieve the level of power that they currently have.
All right, well, so now the level of power that Hamas currently has is the excuse for the permanent state of siege there.
That's right.
The justification for keeping things like chocolate and coriander and ginger, things like that, out of the hands of people of Gaza isn't because they see those as security risks or implements of terrorism.
It's because they see any improvement in the quality of life of Gaza residents to be enhancing the power of Hamas.
And therefore, objectively, it helps terrorists.
Well, I got a couple of things I want to throw in here before you go on, and that is regarding the blockade here.
Dov Weinglass, a former advisor to Ehud Olmert back when he was prime minister, said, quote, the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.
And that's a link that I found from Glenn Greenwald's page.
And he also links to a story from August of 2009 from the UN human rights chief that says Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip is collective punishment and it is illegal.
That's right.
And they're to say that they don't want to make them die of hunger.
And that terrible statement is disingenuous, because in fact, most Palestinians are close to dying of hunger.
Eighty-five percent of them are below the poverty level, and as many as two-thirds of babies under a year old in Gaza are anemic.
You know, the kind of items that they're not allowed to have, soap, safe drinking water, school stationary, newspapers.
You cannot have a newspaper in Gaza.
Incredible.
You know, if they, I guess, if the Likud had it their way, you couldn't have newspapers about Gaza anywhere else.
But we're working on that, I suppose.
All right, now, so talk to me about this flotilla and exactly what happened here.
How many people got shot?
Twenty people were killed on the high seas by the Israeli government, Eric.
Yes, well, what's happened is this is the ninth time that the Gaza aid workers have put together a small fleet, flotilla, whatever they want to call it, of small boats bringing in supplies to the residents of Gaza.
Basic things.
I mean, the types of things that were on that, on those ships were cement, electric wheelchairs, medicine, things that are very important for people to live, but which are not currently allowed into Gaza.
Of the previous times, in four cases, the Israelis let the flotilla come in and distribute their aid.
The other four times they were stopped right off the coast and their supplies were seized and the people were arrested and then released shortly thereafter.
But this time they upped the ante and they declared that they would consider the Gaza aid flotilla to be invading terrorists and would treat them as such.
I don't think anybody who was involved in it actually thought that they would go as far as they did.
All right, now, how did 20 people get killed?
Well, the aid flotilla, which originally was nine ships, three of them ended up turning back.
I do not know the circumstances.
But the ships were waiting 40 miles out, well beyond the legal limit, in international waters, in order to wait for daybreak on Monday.
At about four in the morning, Israeli commandos attacked the flotilla ships, and one of the larger ships had commandos come in and board the ship via helicopter.
Now the Israelis claim that the people on the ship fought them off with knives and sticks and slingshots, and physically.
Which slingshots, huh?
I like that.
That's right.
Sorry, go ahead.
The only thing, that's interesting, because the only thing that the Israelis have shown in terms of evidence was one broken slingshot.
Well, you know, I read a thing in Ynet News that said that they had paintball guns because this is a tactic that they use to suppress peaceniks in Israel at demonstrations and so forth.
And I guess it's supposed to sting enough to keep people back, and then what happened was that wasn't working, and people were picking up improvised weapons, and all of a sudden out came the pistols.
And that was the official story from the Ynet News version.
And even if that is true, even if the people on the ship had fought off the commandos, they would have been in the right, because these people, the Israelis, were acting like Somali pirates.
They were invading a ship on international waters with basically no justification.
Yeah, well, and in fact, even if they had crossed the line, and they were actually in Israeli waters, which is, or Gazan waters, or whoever, I don't know what the official so-called law is there, but that's kind of the whole point, is that they're trying to break an illegal siege.
So any aggression by the Israeli government against them is aggression, period.
Right, and you know, the Israelis see what they're doing as justified regardless of international law.
They clearly don't recognize international law in many areas.
You know, Eric, I think it's worthy a note here that there's this piece in the New York Times today, I don't know if it's in the paper, but it's on their blog, about how this is just like the story of Exodus, and all the Jews who were trying to go to Palestine, and their ship was raided by the British, and a bunch of people were killed, it was a really heavy-handed raid just like this, and it backfired on the British, who at that time controlled Palestine, and it really helped drum up support for the creation of the State of Israel after the Second World War.
That's right, and another example is the Berlin airlift.
Imagine if the Russians had attacked Western Plains, who were coming in to bring supplies to the people of West Berlin.
The Germans would have nuked them.
That's right.
Imagine if the Iranians, Glenn Greenwald says, imagine if the Iranians had done this.
The biggest problem for Americans is that we are paying for this.
Israel is the biggest recipient of U.S. foreign aid.
We give them billions of dollars every year in order to give them the quality of life that they have, while at the same time having an unbelievably aggressive foreign and domestic security policy.
Right, well, and that's the thing too, that it cannot be overstated, the reaction to this around the world, and including, for example, in Baghdad, where Muqtada al-Sadr snapped his fingers over a telephone line somewhere, and 10,000 people came out to protest yesterday.
This goes right to the heart of Petraeus and Obama saying, this is our security interest you're screwing with here now, folks, never mind the 3,000 that died on September 11th as revenge for Lebanon and Palestine.
Right, and the U.S. is solidly with Israel regardless of right and wrong.
That's why last night they blocked the U.N. resolution that would have condemned Israel for the raid.
Yeah, well, you know, it's worrisome, I think, and this just goes into speculation, Eric, but in Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower, he says that it was during Operation Grapes of Wrath, when the Israelis were killing people in southern Lebanon in 1996, that Mohammed Atta went ahead and filled out his last will and testament, and basically decided he was dedicating his life to joining up the war against us.
And of course, Osama bin Laden's first fatwa from the summer of 1996 cited the Qanaa massacre and the entire Operation Grapes of Wrath as a major part of why, you know, we're not going to take this anymore.
How come our blood is water, but your blood is blood?
We'll show you, he said.
Right, and this is why the U.S. is in so much trouble with terrorists around the world, is because we are creating the terrorists through our action and through our support of these kind of policies in Israel and elsewhere.
Well, now, when Barack Obama took office, there was a big Pew poll and everything, and they said, in fact, even just a couple of months ago, they said America is once again the most popular nation in the world, we're in first place ahead of China again, and all the terrible damage that George Bush had done to our reputation had been healed by the election of a black man named Obama.
What about all that?
Well, that was very short-lived.
It was a very quick honeymoon, and if you look at more recent polls, you can see that the U.S. is declining in its approval around the world.
Well, and that's the thing, too, is if we're in a war against a stateless enemy, it doesn't even matter whether Hillary Clinton can go over there and twist arms or whatever.
You're talking about picking a fight with the next hundred Mohammed Attahs out there.
We don't know who they are.
Right, and what we're doing, Gaza is becoming a crockpot, essentially, of terror activities, and all we're doing and all Israel is doing is creating more and more enemies.
These young people, they have no alternatives.
The only alternative they have is to fight for their liberation.
Yeah.
Now, let me keep you over a little bit longer here.
What do you speculate Netanyahu is up to with this?
Is this just a really bad call he made, or is this a deliberate policy of just, you know, fine, everybody hates us, we'll just go ahead and go with that, or what?
Well, it's hard to say.
It's hard to say what's motivating him.
I mean, clearly the Israeli government is so divided that he is trying to satisfy a number of different elements, but I think that you'll see that most of the politicians are supporting what Israel did, and when you talk about the fact that they believe that their commandos were ambushed by the people on the ships, it's just ridiculous.
It's like Orwellian speak.
Yeah, I mean, it seems really counterproductive if they're, I mean, why even bother making an excuse when it's one that's so hollow?
I mean, a couple of the headlines yesterday were the Israelis claim that Al-Qaeda was on the boat.
I mean, give me a break, man.
Who's buying that nonsense?
You can't even get a Tea Party activist to believe that.
The people on the boat primarily were aid workers, European parliamentarians.
There was a Nobel laureate.
The people on those boats were not any sort of combatants.
They were aid workers.
All right, now one last thing, and this is of the highest importance, really, is the headlines that said, and I guess maybe this is just talk, but the Turks, the Turkish government said next time our Navy will escort the flotilla, and then we'll see, and hey, now we're talking about an official NATO ally of 60 years versus a country that is, of course, our very bestest friend in the Middle East, but is not an official ally of the United States at all.
Is that really going to come to a head, you think?
Well, I think the important part of that is that Israel is probably going to lose their closest ally in the Muslim world, which is Turkey.
I actually doubt that any sort of armed aid fleets will be coming through, because the people who were on those boats, they're not interested in an armed battle with Israeli commandos.
They are basically pacifists and aid workers.
I don't think you'll see a lot of volunteers coming forward for next time.
I think that Israel may have scared them off.
Yeah, well, it's possible.
There's obviously a lot of people who would love to bring aid to the people of Gaza, but obviously a fewer number who are really willing to die over it.
Exactly.
As much as I applaud Turkey in saying that, I think that it's probably an unlikely outcome.
All right, everybody, well, that's Eric Garris.
He is the founder and the... what's the rest of your title, man?
The boss.
Director.
Director at Antiwar.com.
Thanks, man.
Appreciate it.
